Shakespeare and Forgetting 9781350211490, 9781350211520, 9781350211513

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Shakespeare and Forgetting

RELATED TITLES Coriolanus: Third Series William Shakespeare Edited by Peter Holland ISBN 978-1-9042-7128-4 Shakespeare and Geek Culture Edited by Andrew James Hartley and Peter Holland ISBN 978-1-3501-0774-8 Shakespeare’s Body Language: Shaming Gestures and Gender Politics on the Renaissance Stage Miranda Fay Thomas ISBN 978-1-3500-3547-8 Staging Britian’s Past: Pre-Roman Britain in Early Modern Drama Kim Gilchrist ISBN 978-1-3501-6334-8 Temporality, Genre and Experience in the Age of Shakespeare: Forms of Time Edited by Lauren Shohet ISBN 978-1-3500-1729-0 Theory for Theatre Studies: Memory Milija Gluhovic ISBN 978-1-4742-4667-5

Shakespeare and Forgetting Peter Holland

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in hardback in Great Britain 2021 This paperback edition 2023 Copyright © Peter Holland, 2021, 2023 Peter Holland has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. ix–xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Ben Anslow Cover image: King Lear, Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) / Barbican Theatre, 1983 © Donald Cooper/Photostage All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938158 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-1149-0 PB: 978-1-3502-1153-7 ePDF: 978-1-3502-1151-3 eBook: 978-1-3502-1150-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Anne Barton (1933–2013)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  ix

Preface  1 1 People Forgetting  15 ‘My memory is tired’  15 ‘I have forgot his name’  21 ‘What was I about to say?’  27

2 Forgiving and Forgetting/Forgetting Oneself  43 3 Forgetting Forgetting  73 Forgetting about forgetting  73 Remembering forgetting  82 Not forgetting  89 Remembering and forgetting  98 Early modern forgetting  102

4 Forgetting, Genre and Gender  109 5 Forgetting People  139 6 Forgetting Performance  167 Needing forgetfulness  167 Forgetting in performance  169 Forgetting the plot  174

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CONTENTS

Resisting performance as loss  177 Not-quite-forgetting performance  180

7 Shakespeare Forgetting/Forgetting Shakespeare  187 Shakespeare forgetting  187 Forgetting Shakespeare  199

Coda: Bookends  213 Notes  218 Index  244

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Early on in Lear’s Daughters, the Women’s Theatre Group’s play based on an idea by Elaine Feinstein, Cordelia muses ‘I don’t remember everything, but when I do, I remember exactly.’ The Fool replies with an old gag: ‘There are only three things I can’t remember. I can’t remember names. I can’t remember faces and I’ve forgotten what the third thing is.’1 In the course of researching and writing this book, I heard an awful lot of old gags, including this one, from friends, when they heard what I was working on, and yet this is the moment when I know I will miss out some names. This project began when I organized a conference at Notre Dame to inaugurate the new endowed Chair that I hold, the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre. I owe so much to John and Susan McMeel and their family, especially their daughter Maureen Carroll and her husband Michael who have taken on the family’s commitment to Shakespeare at Notre Dame, for their continuing warm friendship and generosity. The conference, held in November 2004, became a book, Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and let me repeat my thanks to the many friends who took part in that event, especially remembering the late Barbara Hodgdon, whose wisdom and laughter I miss all the time. Part of Chapter 6 of this book comes from my chapter in that book, ‘On the Gravy Train: Shakespeare, Memory and Forgetting’ (207–34) – my thanks to CUP for permission to do so. Jim Bulman encouraged me to write a chapter for his Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), ‘Forgetting Performance’ (170–83), parts of which also appear here in Chapter 6 – my thanks this time to OUP for permission to do so.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Kenneth Graham and Alysia Kolentsis invited me to talk about that topic at their exhilarating 2017 conference, ‘Shakespeare 401’, in Stratford, Ontario, and the feedback from delegates was very helpful indeed. A small part of Chapter 2 was my contribution to the festschrift for Péter Dávidházi, Built upon His Rock (Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University, 2018) – my thanks to Natália Pikli and her co-editors, Dániel Panka and Veronika Ruttkay, for inviting me to celebrate that great scholar and dear friend. Natália also shared her work on the early modern hobby-horse, which helped greatly with the forgetting of it. Along the way, innumerable friends and colleagues have helped in so many ways. I thank especially Lyn Tribble, for introducing me to Anna Smaill’s The Chimes; Tom Cartelli, for a copy of Forgetting Hamlet and of his own writing on the play; Gabriel Radvansky, who talked to me about psychological approaches to forgetting; Paul Edmondson, Steve Fallon, Andrew Hartley, Nicholas Hytner, Russell Jackson, Daniel Johnson, Lance Olsen, Lena Orlin, Adrian Poole, Steve Tomasula and many more. My fellow oblivionists, Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann, have been supportive and they will, if they read this book, recognize how much I have been dependent on their own writings, published and unpublished, even though every so often I disagree with them. When I realized how much my writing here was influenced by the experience, long ago, of being overwhelmed by the astonishing Shakespeare chapters in William Empson’s The Structure of Complex Words (1951), Stefan Collini shared the proofs of his magnificent new edition of Empson’s book, complete with masses of ancillary material from the Empson archive. Two research leaves from Notre Dame were vital to the writing and I am grateful to all my colleagues in the Dean’s Office for leaving me alone while I was on leave, especially both my bosses, John McGreevy and Sarah Mustillo, and the two colleagues who stood in for me as Associate Dean for the Arts, Jim Collins and Michael Schreffler. Chloe Leach gave me all kinds of help throughout the writing. Mark Dudgeon and Lara Bateman at The Arden Shakespeare have been wonderful to work with and I am humbly grateful too to the four people who wrote such kind and positive reports in

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the midst of the pandemic (Amy Cook and the three anonymous ones). Amy’s help after that has been invaluable. And a fifth reader (who may be identical to one of the first four) gave the typescript a clearance read that included only one suggestion and I have gratefully taken it up. My thanks, too, to Dawn Cunneen who copyedited the typescript superbly. Most of all, I owe my beloved wife, life-partner and dearest friend Romana Huk far, far more than I can ever say, for her love and support and constant encouragement, day in and day out, through good times and difficult times, through travels and the pandemic, through my struggles to get this right and that better and the other the best I could manage. Without her, this book would never have been started, let alone finished. Every day begins and ends in the joy of our being together. Though Romana is owed a dedication, she will, I trust, forgive my decision to dedicate this book to my much-loved and much-missed mentor and friend, Anne Barton, who might, I hope, have enjoyed what I have written and would certainly have sternly corrected my errors. She taught me so much, not least to aspire to write with the lucidity and perceptiveness and brilliance that is on every single page of her own work. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, David Scott Kastan and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds., The Arden Shakespeare Third Series Complete Works (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020), unless otherwise indicated. Quotations from Hamlet are from the Q2 text, again unless otherwise indicated.

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Preface

Warning: it will be a while before this preface reaches out towards Shakespeare. It is a cliché – but not therefore untrue – that we live in a digital world in which we have fundamentally and probably irrevocably altered the ways in which forgetting is and is not possible. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argued over a decade ago, there is virtue in forgetting, especially in a society in which that which is assumed to have been forgotten has a habit of reappearing unexpectedly and damagingly.1 As he traced ‘the demise of forgetting’ and the ‘drivers’ for that demise,2 he came to argue for ways in which forgetting could be reintroduced, like points for a speeding offence added to one’s driving license that are ‘forgotten’ after some years, so that we should be able to erase our pasts, control our privacy, and be assured that when, with one click, we delete something it will stay deleted and not be able to be retrieved later. Nothing that has happened since he wrote about that in 2009 has changed for the better, even if there are times when, say, the revelation of what politicians said years before running for office is rightly prejudicial to their ambitions. One can, of course, argue the reverse case, finding ours a society that desires and achieves forgetting, especially that amnesiac state in which our collective histories are denied and treated as if lost. For Francis O’Gorman what makes modern culture modern is precisely that it focuses on a future, losing contact with its collective histories. Modern forgetting has, for him, a history that can be traced, even as he identifies a contemporary wish to be without history.3 The contrast between the two writers can be articulated perfectly simply, in ways that will recur throughout this book, as

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a gap between individual forgetting and social forgetting, between what one person has forgotten or might wish were able to be forgotten and a culture that manages, often frighteningly, to wish to erase its past. As I write this, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement’s struggle for acknowledgement of the past and present of racism in the United States, the wish to remove statues that honour and celebrate individuals whose actions were, for instance, a contribution to the institutionalization of slavery, a fact of that life that the statue had erased, is seen by opponents as an attempt to erase history, as if the only way to preserve history from collective forgetting is to preserve the celebration of an evil. Both O’Gorman’s and Mayer-Schönberger’s approaches – the social and the individual – can co-exist: our culture struggles with what has been culturally forgotten or could in the future be forgotten, even while our inability fully to delete is a digital vulnerability alongside our emphatic desire so to do. We try socially, culturally and creatively to make sense of the loss of forgetting at the same time at which the apparent rise of occurrence of Alzheimer’s disease makes us aware of what it means for the individual to have uncontrollably been forced to have forgotten. To do so, we have devised fantasies of other ways in which memory can be dealt with, lost, erased or sometimes retrieved. After hearing what the Ghost has to say to him, Hamlet becomes zealous in his commitment to remembering him: Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there … (1.5.98–101) But he is wrong to imagine he can do that. Such active forgetting cannot be achieved. Neither Hamlet nor I can decide what to remember and what to forget. The fantasy of being able to choose to erase one’s own or, even more emphatically, others’ memories, making them forget something or, indeed, everything, is a recurrent one, especially now and especially, though not only, in films.

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A few years ago, scientists at the University of California, Davis were exploring the possibility of such a choice, experimenting on genetically modified mice and proving that they can use lightbeams through fibre-optic cable to affect particular cells in the mice’s hippocampus, thereby stopping them from having the fearfreeze response to being caged, consequent on previously having electric shocks each time they were placed in a cage. Of the ethics of such experiments I make no comment but it is intriguing that the context in which I came across this experiment was while researching the neuralyzer used in the Men in Black films, for the article appeared in the online magazine Quartz with the headline ‘Scientists are a step closer to creating the memory eraser from “Men in Black”’.4 The neuralyzer, called in the comic books source for the films a ‘neurolyser’ and referred to by Jay (Will Smith) throughout the first film, Men in Black (1997), as the ‘flashy thing’, is a device … that wipes the memory of a target. The set length of memory erased can be changed using dials, and the effects can be reversed. In order for agents to not be harmed by the effects, they have ‘Ray-Ban’ sunglasses, that deflect the light created by the neuralyzer. It is the standard equipment of MIB officers. After being neuralyzed, if the agent does not supply the new memory, … a special team is sent in to give memories, and change the environment to reflect these memories.5 In the world of J. K. Rowling, a similar effect is possible through magic, ensuring that, in the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), ordinary humans, known as no-majs, do not retain memory of magic they have seen or experienced. As Newt Scamander explains to Jacob, a no-maj: newt You do realize that when they see you’ve stopped sweating, they’ll Obliviate you in a heartbeat. jacob What does ‘Bliviate’ mean? newt It’ll be like you wake up and all memory of magic is gone.6

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SHAKESPEARE AND FORGETTING

In the climactic scene of magic in the film, Newt responds with a simple and confident statement to Madame Picquery’s horrified outburst, ‘But the magical community is exposed. We cannot Obliviate an entire city’: ‘Actually, I think we can.’ Newt uses Frank the Thunderbird to drop a substance onto New York that proves it is possible to obliviate an entire city: ‘They won’t remember anything. That venom has incredibly powerful Obliviative properties.’7 Rowling did not invent the word ‘obliviate’, to which she always gives an initial capital. In OED, the first citation is from John Gadbury, Britain’s Royal Star (1661), though EarlyPrint [sic] pushes the date slightly earlier, to Gadbury’s Animal Cornutum (1654). EarlyPrint can find only fourteen uses of the verb before 1700, and none of the adjective ‘obliviative’ which may well be of Rowling’s coining. OED, yet to be revised to include Rowling’s use of the word- forms, offers only a single twentieth-century example of ‘obliviate’, in a scholarly article in Eighteenth-Century Studies,8 and marks the word as ‘Now rare’. It may stay rare even after Rowling. I shall often in this book be concerned with etymologies and with particularities of meaning, as here. For these the OED is an invaluable guide, though, for far more trustworthy (though obviously not guaranteed) datings for early modern usages, I am greatly indebted to the searches possible on the wonderful EarlyPrint Lab website, https://earlyprint.org/lab/. In both these film examples, the removal of memory is an act to protect the secrecy of, in Men in Black, the government’s allowing some alien life forms to live on Earth and, in Fantastic Beasts, the presence of a magic community in New York. It is not an act of obliviation (this time probably my coinage) invited by those who experience it and, crucially, they remain unaware that anything has happened to them, both the original event that necessitated the obliviation and the obliviation itself. Clearly in play here is that cultural anxiety about secret and powerful networks within our society, be they Men in Black or magicians, that so typifies a fear of the state within the state, especially in the anti-federalist US. What in both films is technical fantasy is also a sign of tapping into a perceived threat to the individuals and individualism within our social organizations. Rather closer to Hamlet’s wish, though inverting what is to be deleted, is Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant conceit in his screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), where there is

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a company, inventively named Lacuna, Inc., which is ‘a medical corporation specializing in targeted memory erasure’: For those that are suffering from the devastating loss of a loved one, whether it be due to a death, a divorce, or a breakup, our services provide a means for individuals to move on without their pasts to trouble them. Targeted memory erasure has also been proven safe and effective for individuals who suffer from Post-Traumatic Sense Disorder (PTSD) or who have experienced a history of abuse.9 I take this company mission statement from its website, with webpages about its staff and offering a number of names of ‘close friends and relatives of our clients who have seen, first-hand, the benefits of our procedure’. References cannot be given by those who have ‘directly experienced the procedure’ since ‘our clients don’t remember visiting us after we have done our work’.10 Quite who created the website is not clear (the film’s production company or a fan-geek?) but it includes a company history, starting with John W. Lacuna who, aged sixteen, left his native Sweden for New York City in 1887.11 Where Hamlet seeks a general erasure of the ‘trivial fond records’ in order to be able to obey his father’s injunction to remember, Lacuna, Inc. makes possible the erasure of all the trivial features, as well as the non-trivial ones, of another individual, as if they had never been encountered. Offered as an act of healing, the obliteration of the other denies the wholeness of the subject, the control of memory and forgetting no longer a function of the individual but of the corporate other. While the film’s narrative is distinctly dubious about this piece of psychological capitalism, unlike the comfort my first two films have with their forms of erasure, Endless Sunshine speaks of the fantasy of repeated erasure and rediscovery, a lifetime for its central characters of repeating the strengths and weaknesses of their love. Not surprisingly, the film has attracted thoughtful and, indeed, scholarly attention, for, unlike Men in Black or Fantastic Beasts, it fully warrants its presence in a series of volumes called ‘Philosophers on Film’.12 The film’s title comes from Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’: How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

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Eternal sun-shine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d …13 Eloisa’s happiness in forgetting the world and being forgotten by the world is interrogated throughout the film, in a narrative in which there is little sunshine and few minds that are spotless. The four lines of Pope are quoted by Mary (Kirsten Dunst) to Dr Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) as she watches him at work erasing memory, creating a spotless mind, making Joel (Jim Carrey) forget, at Joel’s request, not the whole world but everything about his erstwhile partner Clementine (Kate Winslet), who has already called on the services of Lacuna, Inc. to erase her memories of Joel.14 That these movies are now our fantasies only makes them eloquent testimonies to the kinds of desires of which Hamlet was speaking. Yet film has also explored an entirely different dynamic of forgetting, the terror of the forgetting that Alzheimer’s brings to the sufferer and the pain that that suffering brings to those nearest to them, in films that are, in the current popular formulation of film genres, unequivocally ‘Dramas’, rather than Fantasy or Sci-fi. Where both Men in Black and Fantastic Beasts are, differently, focused on male protagonists and though Eternal Sunshine gives both Clementine and Mary agency, in their choice to undergo the procedure and in Mary’s case to destroy Lacuna, Inc.’s crucial acts of confidentiality and secrecy, films exploring Alzheimer’s have frequently offered a different concentration on female experience. In, for instance, Away From Her (2006) and Still Alice (2014), the two films that for me are the finest of such of the outpouring of such films as I have seen,15 it is the balance between sufferer and husband, Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant (Gordon Pinsent) in the former and Alice (Julianne Moore) and John (Alec Baldwin) in the latter, that is most painful to watch. I hesitate to find in the gender of director or screenwriter something that in and of itself points to this different concentration and therefore I simply note that Sarah Polley had both roles on Away From Her, earning an Oscar nomination for her screenplay. Christie’s performance of Fiona’s having completely forgotten her husband and Moore’s charting of the stages of Alice’s slow decline to a point where she cannot even follow her own earlier recording of the steps needed to commit suicide are both brilliant and devastating. Even in a case where the lead female actor is not the sufferer but the spouse, Helen Mirren’s Ella in The Leisure

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Seeker (2017), herself dying of cancer but making one last trip with John (Donald Sutherland) in their beloved RV as he clings to what little remains of his own memory, female agency is crucial, for, at the end, rather than leave John to cope with what awaits him in his disease and at the hands of their controlling children, she deliberately diverts the exhaust system of the RV and leaves the engine running so that they die together as they sleep. We have no cure for Alzheimer’s, only some steps in diseaseappropriate palliative care for the anguish of knowing that one’s memories are vanishing. In a different area of medical research, there is the desire to find a path to create forgetfulness for memories that are traumatic, such as those that are central to the disabling distortions of PTSD. Far more serious than the aims of Lacuna, Inc., and more likely to be effective than a transfer of the light-beams in the UC Davis research project from mice to humans, the ‘forgetting pill’, as it has been dubbed, would inhibit protein synthesis when memories are accessed. Karim Nader’s research in this area established that, far from memories remaining intact each time they are accessed, like a word.doc that, when opened and then closed, is exactly the same as before it was opened, the brain remakes memories, so that ‘every time we think about the past we are delicately transforming its cellular representation in the brain, changing its underlying neural circuitry’.16 Where the previous assumption had been that, posttrauma, debriefing about the critical incident was held to reduce stress, it appears now that the reverse is true: New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge. That’s why pushing to remember a traumatic event so soon after it occurs doesn’t unburden us; it reinforces the fear and stress that are part of the recollection.17 Nader’s approach returned to earlier work on memory reconsolidation18 and generated replicable results on the endless remaking of memory at the moment of recall. Memory, far from being a fixed entity that decays over time, changes with the emotional state at the point of recall. Fantasy films, Alzheimer’s screenplays, forgetting pills and the like are modern responses to the anxieties around forgetting. I have

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started here because it is of my moment and my readers’ time. But it is not a definition of the parameters of this book. It aims not to explain early modern anxieties about memory and forgetting nor simply to point to modern parallels but to explore how Shakespeare and forgetting are complexly intertwined. In her review of ‘The State of the Art of Memory and Shakespeare Studies’, the last chapter in the very large volume that constitutes The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory, Rebeca Helfer comments that, ‘As scholars have increasingly reimagined early modern memory studies, one of the most significant turns has been towards forgetting – or more precisely, the dynamic and dialectical relationship between remembering and forgetting.’19 To illustrate her point, Helfer quite rightly mentions the fine work in four major publications: Forgetting Early Modern English literature and Culture, a collection edited by Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams (London: Routledge, 2004), in Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and in two excellent studies of Shakespeare’s histories, Jonathan Baldo’s Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting (London: Routledge, 2012) and Isabel Karremann’s The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Yet, in spite of such studies, all of which have been powerfully influential on my own, there is no book directly and more generally devoted to Shakespeare and forgetting. That is the gap that my book aims to fill. I will be doing so with an almost unremitting focus on Shakespeare’s dramaturgy of forgetting and audiences’ responses to it. The first chapter, ‘People Forgetting’, looks at three examples of characters in Shakespeare forgetting something: Coriolanus forgetting the name of his sometime host in Corioles, now a Roman prisoner; Polonius forgetting what he was about to say next to Reynaldo; Fluellen, in the aftermath of Agincourt, forgetting the name of ‘the fat knight’, Falstaff. I know, of course, that these are characters, not people, that they are dramatic constructs performed by an actor’s body but they have a further mode of existence in which we acquiesce. As Jelena Marelj comments, at the outset of her study of character: Shakespeare’s dramatis personae are definitively not human, yet the reception history of his plays shows that critics, audiences

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and actors have nevertheless experienced them as such – as familiar, accessible, yet simultaneously evasive and ultimately unfathomable individuals who seem to exist outside of and prior to their play-texts.20 Chapter 2, ‘Forgiving and Forgetting/Forgetting Oneself’, considers Shakespeare’s explorations of these two forms of forgetting, across a wide group of plays, including a number of histories and, particularly powerfully, The Winter’s Tale. Chapter 3, ‘Forgetting Forgetting’, traces a range of approaches to forgetting, including Freud and Nietzsche, Ricoeur, Anderson and Connerton, hypermnesiacs in Borges and Luria, the case of Sherlock Holmes, classical approaches to the topic and early modern thinking about forgetting and oblivion. Its aim is to set up a group of theoretical frameworks within which the rest of the materials, in the earlier and later chapters, might be placed. Deliberately, the chapter pays virtually no attention to Shakespeare, leaving the connections and interactions more open than is usually the case. I have tried, nonetheless, to chart in this chapter how the theorizing of memory and forgetting across history moves between the forms of individual and social forgetting with which Shakespeare too is so powerfully concerned. Chapter 4 traces Shakespeare’s thinking about forgetting and oblivion in tragedies and comedies (to complement the extensive fine work on the histories by Baldo and Karremann mentioned above), considering whether the words themselves are used in ways which are generically different and how that interconnects, at times and in modes of instability, with characters’ gender identities. Chapter 5, ‘Forgetting People’, turns its attention to the interaction with audiences, here with respect to those people who leave the plays’ worlds, characters who leave the stage, never return, and are, to a greater or lesser extent, forgotten by the audience, such as Fool and, later, both Lear and Cordelia in King Lear, Adam in As You Like It, Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, and Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale. Chapter 6 considers how audiences forget Shakespeare performance as well as commenting on other forms of forgetfulness onstage, while Chapter 7 turns back directly to Shakespeare to consider what might be identified as moments of Shakespeare’s forgetting, before touching on what we forgot and forget about

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Shakespeare. A final brief coda complements the concerns with films in this preface. I want to spend the last part of my preface recognizing, in ways that the rest of the book deliberately understates, the ways in which memory and forgetting are locked together, as they are, for instance, in the title of both Baldo’s and Sullivan’s books mentioned above. Over and over again, writers on the topic of memory and forgetting offer different and incompatible ways of explaining or expounding that interconnectedness. The norm is a negative one. As Roberto Cubelli put it, even as he sets out to form ‘a new taxonomy of memory and forgetting’, ‘Forgetting is always referred to in negative terms, as a state or condition where memory does not work normally and appears to be faulty.’21 The intertwining may, though, be different and rather less negative. Lewis Hyde’s very first aphorism in his brilliant Primer for Forgetting is, quite simply, ‘Every act of memory is an act of forgetting.’22 Douwe Draaisma argues, near the start of his fine study: [O]ur intuition [is] that remembering and forgetting are opposites and therefore mutually exclusive. What people remember has apparently not been forgotten and what they have forgotten they must be unable to remember. Forgetting is the minus sign applied to remembering. But this is an example of being bewitched by our own metaphors. In reality, forgetting exists within remembering like yeast in dough.23 Draaisma is, of course, well aware that he resists the spell of a metaphor by offering one. So, too, is Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir when, as she begins her study of forgetting in life-writing and fiction, she suggests that ‘Memory and forgetting are caught in each other’s web’.24 She quotes José F. Colmeiro arguing that, If, as Mario Benedetti has claimed, ‘forgetting is full of memories’, it is no less certain that memory is full of forgetting. Forgetting leaves behind traces of memory … ‘Memory forgets’, as David Herzberger has said … [M]emory reconstructs or invents what is forgotten or inaccessible in the past.25 So strong is our wish to find one of the two embedded in the other that we may strain the evidence in order to do so. Ann Rigney suggests

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that recollection is an active and constantly shifting relationship to the past, in which the past is changed retrospectively in the sense that its meaning is changed. Indeed, anamnesis may be even better than either remembrance or ‘memory’, since it emphasizes the fact that recollection involves overcoming oblivion (an-amnesis), and that forgetting precedes remembering rather than vice versa.26 It is an enticing way of thinking about the word ‘anamnesis’ but the word is not usually perceived as being etymologically made up of an- and amnesis but of ana and mnesis, a calling back to mind, not a negation of amnesis.27 Rigney is, in effect, drawing on an etymology set out as early as George Wither’s translation of Bishop Nemesius’ The Nature of Man (1636): ‘Recordation (or remembrance) called by the Greekes Anamnesis; is when forgetfulnesse hath interrupted our memory; for it is a recovering of memory, which was lost, when it failed by forgetfulnesse.’28 If memory is presence, the absence that is therefore signified by forgetting becomes, as Emilio Lledó suggests, ‘something like death’,29 or, as Gudmundsdottir glosses it, ‘The forgotten is dead memory which cannot be revived, whereas memory is plenitude, life and knowledge’ (4). Inevitably this suggests a return to the negative tag attached to forgetting but it need not be so. Marc Augé, in his extraordinary book Oblivion, makes the bald statement that ‘Memory and oblivion in some way have the same relationship as life and death’ but, as he develops his sense of what ‘in some way’ might indicate, he can move towards an equally bald but far more surprising formulation: ‘In short, oblivion is the life force of memory and remembrance is its product.’30 As one of Lewis Hyde’s aphorisms for his section on Myth puts it, adjusted from a comment by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Memory and oblivion, we call that imagination.’31 In the world of creativity of the Dadaists, forgetting the self was the necessary release of the imagination. Francis Picabia framed this in the punning title of an artwork from 1919–20, ‘M’amenez-y’, meaning ‘Take me there’ but also punning on ‘ma amnésie’, ‘my amnesia’.32 But, to return to our digital world, I am struck by the frequency with which memory became, in cognitive psychology and elsewhere, for so long an unmediated act of data retrieval from a storage system, a view that, as Nader’s work has shown, is no longer a tenable position. But, in any case, as John Frow complains, this image is problematic because of ‘its inability to account for

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forgetting other than as a fault or as a decay or as a random failure of access’.33 What was true when he wrote that in 1997 is even truer now. For a long time the dominant theory of forgetting in psychology was one of interference, the argument that proactive interference (PI) at the time of the encoding of the memory affected the individual’s ability to make the memory efficiently enough for it to be recalled subsequently.34 Earlier, experimental psychologists had been interested in notions of retroactive interference (RI), seeing memory affected by subsequent events which displaced or rendered inaccessible the stored memories. Both versions of interference theory displaced earlier accounts dependent solely on notions of decay. The mere fact that retention improved if sleep rather than waking intervened before recall was prompted suggested that it was reasonable to hold that what happened during waking, i.e. further acts of memory, got in the way of the original data. Straightforward accounts of a decay theory of memory cannot account for such differences. PI, RI and the trace decay theory that they effectively displaced all see the forgetting as a result of the inadequacy of the creation and preservation of the memory. But there are also theories that depend on faults in the process of retrieval itself, such as output interference and cue-dependent forgetting, in both of which something occurs to make the prompts necessary for the retrieval of the memory data become corrupted. However one seeks to reconcile these various theories – and each individually and in all combinations seem to have some adherents – they share a recurrent use of a language that acts as a set of metaphors drawn from an analogy to digital practices. Let me emphasize here that, though the above brief dabblings in cognitive psychology would appear to indicate the connection of my work in this book with the flourishing of the cognitive turn in Shakespeare studies and equally in theatre studies, present in so much exciting recent work, the intersections between my approach to Shakespeare and forgetting and the work on Shakespeare and cognition are few. I am not aiming to see how recent cognitive work might affect our understanding of the plays. Instead the lenses I use are much more often derived either from early modern thinking or from dramaturgical/performance practice. In any case, there is one area of forgetting about which psychology, it appears, has nothing to say, a field of usage which

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uses the concept of forgetting to apply it to a quite other group of social behaviour. Take the remarkable late-twentieth-century interjection that has made its ways into the hallowed data-files of the OED: ‘fuhgeddaboudit’. It is used either as a word-phrase to ‘indicate that a suggested scenario is unlikely or undesirable’ or as an imperative, glossed in OED, via its origins in ‘forget about it’, as ‘don’t let it trouble you’, ‘no problem’, and therefore linked to ‘forget it’ (forget, v. 1.a) as ‘take no more notice of it, don’t mention it’. Such phrases encourage the speaker who is addressing the person to feel comfortable in ignoring the event or whatever else is being alluded to. In effect it carries the sense of ‘I don’t mind your forgetting it’ or, even more often, ‘I don’t mind your treating it as something forgotten’. There is an overtone here of a performance of forgetting: I am fine with your behaving as if you’ve forgotten this, whether you have or not. It does not quite have what the OED calls ‘a stronger sense’ where it is ‘[t]o neglect willfully, take no thought of, disregard, overlook, slight’ (forget, 4). Where ‘forget about it’ is recent and ‘forget it’ seems to emerge shortly before 1900 (not least in the warning ‘don’t you forget it’, for which OED offers an example from 1888), this willful sense is found in Middle English. It is, as it were, forgetting without forgetting, choosing to neglect and therefore being able to act as if the neglected thing (rule, event, whatever) has been forgotten. It is the ‘as if’ that is significant. Harald Weinrich emphasized, as he began his marvellously wideranging exploration of ‘the art and critique of forgetting’, that ‘the ways in which forgetting is modalized’ is something that has not been taken into account. Two of his examples, ‘I want to forget that but I can never forget it’ and ‘I couldn’t forget that, even if I wanted to’, will come up frequently in my study.35 As he notes, since forgetting is itself often negative, the negation of it ‘produces a double negation with an affirmative meaning’ (3), as in ‘Don’t forget the key!’, a phrase which is a more emphatic form of ‘Remember the key!’. In English, French and German, such a form occurs as the popular and age-old name for myosotis: ‘forget-menot’, ‘indispensable for lovers … and … a reminder to be faithful that is at least as effective as its positive version, the pansy (derived from the French pensée)’ (3) – and, of course, I hear here Ophelia’s connection of plant-name and mental activity, ‘there is pansies: that’s for thoughts’ (4.5.170–1).

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Since oblivion will play its part in this book, I also note Weinrich’s sharp perception of its root in the Latin oblivisci, a deponent verb, i.e. one with a passive form but an active meaning, ‘a formal characteristic that fits in well with the psychic meaning of forgetting, which as in fact situated halfway between activity and passivity’ (3). Even these games with the senses, modalities and etymologies seem to me not to cover some of the senses that, in later chapters, I will be considering in Shakespeare, for the pretence of forgetting through adopting the right and practice to treat something or someone as forgotten is with substantial frequency a mode of behaviour that intrigues Shakespeare. It is there, for instance, when, near the end of All’s Well That Ends Well, the King tells Bertram, both of them thinking Helena is dead, as they plan a new marriage, ‘Be this sweet Helen’s knell, and now forget her.’ (5.3.67). It clearly does not mean that Bertram should somehow actively forget her, delete the memory of her, but rather that, as he moves, supposedly, to marry Lafeu’s daughter Maudlin, he can behave as if the memory of Helena is effectively erased, the statement that serves as her knell erasing her, punningly, as Nell, as a Helen who can have the nickname Nell as a mark of intimacy. Actions, subject to such permission to forget, here as an instruction from the King, make of the forgetting something performative, behaving as if something untrue is true, here that Helena has been forgotten. Acting at this moment in the play has a theatrical overtone: Bertram is allowed to be an actor, feigning something as acceptably forgotten. Shakespeare is here dramatizing a densely complex form of social performance. But I turn first to simpler moments where Shakespeare documents the most familiar form of forgetting, when we lose the thread of what we are saying or forget someone’s name that we are trying hard to call to mind.

1 People Forgetting

Here are three moments of forgetting, moments where a character in a Shakespeare play is aware of what he has forgotten (all are male), where Shakespeare seeks to foreground the fact of forgetfulness in its most ubiquitous of forms, the ones we immediately recognize with that tinge of embarrassment and self-identification. These are no more than three small case studies, three examples of the kinds of thinking we can have about one kind of individual forgetfulness that Shakespeare explores, three moments that will open up what I will investigate in other ways later.

‘My memory is tired’ The first is in Coriolanus. In Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s ‘Life of Coriolanus’, Shakespeare read an account of Caius Martius’s request following the great victory at the city of Corioli, after he had turned down the consul’s offer of taking a share of the spoils before the distribution among the rest of the army. Only, this grace (sayed he) I crave, and beseeche you to graunt me. Among the Volsces there is an olde friende and hoste of mine, an honest wealthie man, and now a prisoner, who living before in great wealth in his owne countrie, liveth now a poore prisoner in the handes of his enemies: and yet notwithstanding all this his miserie and misfortune, it would doe me great pleasure if I could save him from this one daunger: to keepe him from being solde as a slave.1

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North goes on to describe the army’s reaction to Martius’s lack of ‘covetousness’ but has nothing more to say about the request on behalf of this ‘olde friende’, not even whether the consul granted it. Reading attentively, as Shakespeare usually did with his major narrative source, the passage clearly seemed to him worth using but he changed it in striking ways: coriolanus      The gods begin to mock me: I, that now refused most princely gifts, Am bound to beg of my lord general. cominius Take’t, ’tis yours. What is’t? coriolanus I sometime lay here in Corioles, At a poor man’s house; he used me kindly. He cried to me; I saw him prisoner, But then Aufidius was within my view And wrath o’erwhelmed my pity. I request you To give my poor host freedom. cominius           O, well begged! Were he the butcher of my son, he should Be free as is the wind. Deliver him, Titus. lartius Martius, his name. coriolanus     By Jupiter, forgot! I am weary; yea, my memory is tired. Have we no wine here? cominius        Go we to our tent. The blood upon your visage dries; ’tis time It should be looked to. Come.    Exeunt. (1.9.77–93) Cominius had, as this extract begins, turned away from Martius and was busy giving orders to Lartius about the future peace negotiations with Volscians in Rome when Martius raises the topic. It comes out of the blue, not as a recalling of something seen earlier but as an offstage event that apparently occurred during or after the fighting. The prisoner is no longer wealthy; instead he is ‘poor’, his plea unrelated to the potential dishonour of being sold as a slave. The contact is no longer one of an old friendship but of

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a single event, a night spent at the poor man’s house, a memory of kindness from his host. There is, in neither case, any explanation of why Martius was staying in Corioli but it is distinctly unusual in the play for Martius to be concerned for someone poor, given his usual attitude to the citizens of Rome. The plea is also placed in relation to Martius’s focus on Aufidius; that is why he could not act on the request in the moment. Cominius immediately grants the prisoner freedom, with a completeness of engagement that is odd: ‘Were he the butcher of my son’, the first and only time Cominius’s son is mentioned. The word ‘son’ appears twentynine times in the play, most often referring to Volumnia’s son, a few times for Martius’s son, once for Martius as ‘son and heir to Mars’ (4.5.197), and, strikingly, in its last occurrence, the cry of a Volscian about Coriolanus’s fighting, ‘He killed my son’ (5.6.122), an event that did happen as opposed to Cominius’s imagining of an event that, as far as we know, has not occurred. But Lartius, in order to carry out the order, needs the man’s name and Martius has forgotten it. He is exhausted and needs wine. He leaves with Cominius and Lartius and, crucially, the freeing of the prisoner is never referred to again. Forgetting a name is something we all do and it is hardly surprising that, in the aftermath of his extraordinary battlefield prowess, a name should have slipped Martius’s mind. As Case and Craig commented, in the first Arden edition, this is ‘the amnesia of an exhausted man, which the wine he asks for probably disperses’.2 The moment shows an unexpected side to Martius: here he at least tries to be kind and to respond to a kindness he received, something he will have great difficulty doing in Rome. Actors have made it distinctly moving: Edmund Kean, in 1820, was praised for the ‘beautiful and engaging simplicity’ of his speaking, though, ‘the name of his host being demanded, [he] made a long pause – tapped his forehead two or three times – but finding nothing there, said, in a low and hurried voice – “By Jupiter, forgotten!” [sic]’;3 Salvini in 1885 was ‘tender, compassionate’ and, when asked the name, ‘staggers, grasps the arm of Cominius, and smiles as he presses his hand to his brow and shakes his head’.4 So one aspect of the very deliberate addition Shakespeare makes to North can be and has been a moment of remarkable realism, a normality, the exceptional individual behaving in a way that lesser mortals also do.

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Some have seen the moment as a sign of all that is wrong in Coriolanus’s behaviour. As Case notes, ‘Some critics believe that Shakespeare’s purpose in inventing the circumstances of Coriolanus’s forgetfulness is to represent him as being so selfish that he does not care to take the trouble to remember the name of his poor host’,5 making the request ‘entirely out of a sense of what his own magnanimity requires of him’.6 Case resists such an explanation and, in so doing, shows how his reading of the moment depends on a construction of character with which he must make the moment fit: ‘His nature … was equally capable of forgetting its pride in answer to kindness accepted from a poor man.’7 One thing we probably do not do is to imagine that this is simply performative, what Brockbank calls ‘an affectation of magnanimity’.8 From a different person we might have seen it as carefully staged, a pretence that wins sympathy. The forgetting is, instead, embedded into our perception of a character we have already come to know, unexpected perhaps but not subversive of the construction the performance and the audience are collaborating in constructing. If not a staged pretence, does the switch in status of the man help? Jonas Barish suggests that [a]s a poor man, after all, whatever his excellent private and personal qualities, the erstwhile host belongs to the despised lower orders … Even when he wishes to, Coriolanus cannot quite let himself go enough to bring to mind the name of a plebeian who had once succoured him, but must let him sink back into the undifferentiated mass of scorned commoners. Barish’s reading makes this more than a matter of fatigue, a sign of ‘an underlying ambivalence’ that is ‘probably as close as Shakespeare ever comes to depicting the kind of memory lapse that interested Freud, the tendentious forgetfulness motivated by repression’.9 Freud will of course figure largely later in this book but here his notion of such forgetfulness, in its attempt at the repression of desire – something defined as always impossible, for the memory of desire can only be repressed, never eliminated – becomes differently definitional of the self that Caius Martius is. Not, then, a performance of failed magnanimity but a revelatory moment of

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the impossibility of combining a wish for the kind of reciprocal action that might mark common humanity and compassion with the consequence of a patrician attitude his mother has worked so hard to create as instinctive in him. As Robert Watson rightly puts it, the passage is ‘an incident so irrelevant to the plot that it begs for thematic interpretation … – plausibly, another instance of his preconscious refusal of the mutual dependency of life.’10 Whatever the explanation, Brockbank saw the pattern in the scene: ‘one name is found in the scene and another lost’.11 Caius Martius will become Coriolanus when the prisoner’s name is lost. Shakespeare is always busily creating patterns, like the prisoner who might have killed Cominius’s son and the parent whose son Coriolanus killed. We hear echoes, see the balancing, the weighty significance of one new name and the effective unimportance of the other. Even if the wine does not disperse this amnesia, Martius could, one might suppose, go through the crowd of prisoners until he sees the poor man. Though the problem is never resolved, we can also think of it as resolvable, capable of giving this man his freedom, provided Martius remembers or is reminded to do so. Is the pattern in the scene and/or the sympathetic realism sufficient to explain Shakespeare’s invention here? Does the forgetfulness mean more than this? What is that thematic interpretation for which it begs? There will be two further significant moments of things forgotten in the play: the first when, in that strangely disturbing scene of two spies meeting, Adrian cannot place the other person: ‘Truly I have forgot you.’ Clued that he is a Roman traitor, Adrian can now find the name: ‘Nicanor, no?’ ‘The same, sir.’ (4.3.3–7). Two new characters lose their anonymity and acquire names. Can we trust that Adrian speaks the truth when he says ‘Truly’ or is it the caution a spy should have, waiting to see how the other will respond? The scene will play equally well both these ways. The choice is the actor’s. The other forgetting is again by Martius himself, meeting the women in the play’s climactic scene: ‘Like a dull actor now / I have forgot my part, and I am out, / Even to a full disgrace.’ (5.3.40–2). The metatheatricality is common in the play but, given Martius’s antipathy towards performance and pretence, it is something he has earlier strongly resisted, as, finally acceding to his mother’s request, he heads to the marketplace to try to calm the people: ‘You have put me now to such a part which

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never / I shall discharge to th’ life.’ (3.2.106–7). Now, again, he is like a bad actor, risking forgetting his role, being ‘out’ (see p. 44). In these two moments Martius’s concern is with the inevitability of his giving a bad performance. That might push further the notion that forgetting the prisoner’s name is not performative, that it is a genuine forgetting, a sign of something else occurring here. And there will be other moments of forgetting in the play: Sicinius predicting that the people ‘will forget, / With the least cause, these his new honours’ (2.1.226–7); Martius, told to encourage the people to think about him, responding ‘I would they would forget me’ (2.3.57), wanting to be forgotten; Sicinius reminding the people of Martius’s behaviour in the gown of humility, ‘forget not / With what contempt he wore the humble weed’ (2.3.218–19); and Menenius finding an integrity in the physical compulsiveness of Coriolanus’ behaviour, especially when angry,            His heart’s his mouth. What his breast forges that his tongue must vent, And, being angry, does forget that ever He heard the name of death. (3.1.259–63) Forgetting becomes a strand in the play, threading through acts of prediction, recollection and possibility as well as the inevitability of an individual’s uncontrollable responses. Shakespeare here thinks about what individuals forget, what communities risk forgetting, how the nation is always teetering on the edge of forgetfulness. The range of usages in this play traverse the most realist normality of individual forgetting and the most demanding of social acts of forgetting. Engagements with the play have also thought further about such matters: Bertolt Brecht ended his adaptation with a new scene in which the government of Rome – consuls, senators and tribunes – turns down Menenius’s request that Coriolanus’s name ‘be inscribed in the Capitol’, a request for cultural memory that, by being refused, turns into the state’s decree of the effective erasure of the individual, its intention to forget the traitor’s name.12 It seems inevitable that, in this most fiercely political play, Shakespeare should make forgetting something that so often mediates between the individual and the polis, between being sometimes an act of political manipulation and sometimes the forgetfulness of an exhausted warrior.

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‘I have forgot his name’ The second example is another forgotten name, this time a name that, unlike that of the Volscian prisoner, the audience does know and could easily offer as a prompt for this act of forgetting. In Henry V, in the middle of the battle of Agincourt, as Fluellen is trying to cope with the traumatic impact on him of the slaughter of the boys, he constructs an elaborate comparison between Henry and Alexander, based on their places of birth and events in their lives. Just as Alexander when drunk killed his friend Cleitus, ‘so also Harry Monmouth, being in his right wits and his good judgments, turned away the fat knight with the great-belly doublet: he was full of jests, and gipes, and knaveries and mocks; I have forgot his name.’ (4.7.46–50). What John Walter in his Arden 2 edition called ‘the delicious dissimilarity between the drunken Alexander killing Cleitus and the sober Henry turning away Falstaff’,13 we might see as less dissimilar. Though Gower says Henry ‘never killed any of his friends’, the audience has heard, much earlier, as the news of Falstaff’s serious illness is discussed, that, in Mistress Quickly’s mind, ‘The King has killed his heart.’ (2.1.87). And it is after the next scene, the one in which Henry orders the execution of the traitorous Scroop, another erstwhile friend, that Pistol announces baldly ‘Falstaff he is dead’ (2.3.6), which, since Mrs Quickly refers to him as ‘Sir John’ (2.1.116), is the only time we hear Falstaff’s name in this play until Gower fills in the blank in Fluellen’s memory: ‘I have forgot his name.’ ‘Sir John Falstaff.’ (4.7.49–51). But how does Gower say the name? Immediately? After ransacking his brain for it? Helpfully? Surprised? Sympathetically? Tentatively? It’s just the name, nothing more, and elicits from Fluellen nothing more than ‘That is he.’ How can Falstaff’s name slip anyone’s mind, even in the middle of a battle, even after the terrible news of the murder of the boys in the camp? Trauma affects memory, of course, but is that what Shakespeare wants us to be thinking about? We cannot forget Falstaff and so are probably less than sympathetic towards Fluellen’s lapse. The most memorable of the whole vast array of characters in the previous two plays in the cycle, someone whose death has been so poignantly mourned in this play, surely his name deserves to be remembered. As

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Hamlet says mockingly, when Ophelia reminds him that it is four months since his father’s death, (deliberately?) mishearing her ‘twice two months’, ‘O heavens – die two months ago and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year!’ (3.2.124–6). The more we recall of the complexity of individuality that was Falstaff, the less we can accept the absence of his name. As Anne Barton argues, forgetting Falstaff’s name seems a harsh fate for the man who once claimed that ‘I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any other word but my name.’ (2 Henry IV, 4.2.18–20), not foreseeing that when the belly went the way of all flesh so would the name.14 This was not the first time that Shakespeare had played on the forgettability of Falstaff’s name. In Merry Wives of Windsor, he wrote this exchange: ford Where had you this pretty weathercock? mistress page I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of. – What do you call your knight’s name, sirrah? robin Sir John Falstaff. ford Sir John Falstaff? mistress page He, he; I can never hit on’s name. (3.2.16–22) Gary Taylor argued that both moments of forgetting, Fluellen’s and Mrs Page’s, are simply and exclusively metatheatrical jokes, references to the name change Shakespeare had to make for the character, turning Oldcastle into Falstaff: … slyly and ironically, Shakespeare reminds audiences of Sir John’s previous identity, and of ‘how [he has] been transformed’ … Mistress Page’s lapse of memory, in what was probably the first play Shakespeare finished after Sir John’s surname had been censored, has no dramatic point beyond its comic allusion

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to the confusion created by the change in name of an already famous character. An almost identical oblivion, equally pointless, overtakes Fluellen ….15 It might well have been intended in that way and have been heard in that way by some, perhaps even many or most, of the audience. After all, at the end of Henry IV Part 2, Shakespeare’s epilogue carefully explains, as he anticipates Henry V, in the event inaccurately, that ‘Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man’ (Epilogue 2.15). If, as is frequently argued, the Epilogue (or part of it at least, though perhaps not this part) was written to be spoken at court, in the presence of the Queen, then the concern over the character’s naming might well have been familiar to nearly all the audience. But I am fairly confident that the proportion of playgoers at the Globe or the Curtain (if this section of the Epilogue was written to be spoken at one or more performances in the public playhouse) who would have known about the name change would have been nothing like as high as at court. Even if the argument for these passages being metatheatrical references in both Merry Wives and Henry V were proven and even if this were widely recognized among early playgoers, it has not been true for the playgoers who throughout the plays’ stage histories have heard these lines. Good performers of Mrs Page can make the moment very funny and Fluellen’s memory lapse has struck many as a strange moment. The former can have ‘dramatic point’ well beyond ‘its comic allusion to … the change in name’ and the latter is very far from being ‘equally pointless’. Mrs Page’s mistake plays on the comedy of faked forgetting. I assume, given Mrs Quickly’s comment earlier that leads to Robin’s moving to the Page household (‘But Mistress Page would desire you to send her your little page, of all loves’ [2.2.108–9]), that Mrs Page knows Falstaff’s name perfectly well and simply pretends to have forgotten it in this conversation with Ford. Here forgettability is feigning, where Fluellen’s is markedly troubling, as it was to Anne Barton, as I quoted above. Fluellen’s act of forgetting also mimics Henry’s deliberate forgetting as he turns Falstaff away: ‘I know thee not, old man’ (2H4, 5.5.46). Henry’s two uses of ‘old’ in this speech (‘so surfeitswelled, so old’ [50]) are the last of the more than forty times the word ‘old’ has resounded through the play: Falstaff who tells Mrs Quickly ‘I am old, I am old’, ‘old Double’, the ‘old King’, Mouldy’s

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‘old dame’, ‘old mistress Ursula’ and many more. Henry’s deliberate refusal to identify Falstaff by name so that he becomes only an ‘old man’ is the denial of the reality of the particularity of Falstaff’s existence, that individuality that names confer and which the generic ‘old man’ effectively denies, a presence restricted only to the dream state from which Henry has ‘awaked’ and which he now ‘despise[s]’. Not knowing is to feign forgetfulness, to perform an act of consigning Falstaff to oblivion, of deliberate forgetting, of turning Falstaff away as he has ‘turned away my former self’. One failure of memory echoes, then, an act that will make Falstaff forgotten. But this does not explain quite why Shakespeare wants Falstaff to be not not-remembered at this point. Isabel Karremann, one of the few to confront this moment, argues that ‘the audience has probably forgotten Falstaff’ by this point in the play: the scene reminds the audience to resort to their own historical and theatrical memory in order to withstand the force of nationalist oblivion … In activating the audience’s memory, this scene offers an opportunity to resist the flood of patriotic images  … In this sense, the play in performance is not only a vehicle of nationalist oblivion but also of resistant memory. Such resistance is enabled, above all, by the play’s contrapuntal sequencing and the theatrical memories that audience members were clearly expected to bring to a play.16 This places weight on Falstaff as subversive commentary, the figure who, by being invoked here, denies what the triumph of Agincourt might be seen as doing. But, if Falstaff is often a commentary on the processes of history, so the doings of Henry IV and now Henry V are a commentary on Falstaff. Falstaff at Shrewsbury, for instance, is not the comfortably comic figure of the Gadshill robbery, especially in his account of what has happened to his troops. He may ‘have peppered two of them’, speaking of the imaginary men in buckram (1 Henry IV, 2.5.186–7), but at Shrewsbury ‘I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered; there’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end to beg during life.’ (5.3.36–8). If Falstaff on honour subverts the premises of the rebellion, his deliberate action that leads to the death of 147 of his men is shockingly brutal, especially as its purpose was presumably, as in other comments on this practice, to enable the

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officer to draw the dead soldiers’ pay for himself. In a battle in which the French murder the boys in the camp, Falstaff’s actions are disconcertingly echoed. I am not convinced that this remembering by apparently forgetting serves unequivocally to create the act of resistance Karremann envisages. For Jonathan Baldo, by contrast, Falstaff himself is the epitome of forgetfulness. Seeing the extensive erasure in the tetralogy of a Lollard subtext (not least in Falstaff’s original incarnation as Sir John Oldcastle), Baldo argues that Long before he is forgotten by his old friend the king, the original identity of this knight who seems so forgetful of his place, duties, and function has been, in turn, firmly denied and forgotten. Constructed of layer upon layer of forgetting, Falstaff’s character is nothing so much as a dilated figure of forgetfulness itself, its importance swelling for an England reinventing itself as a nationstate.17 Falstaff, of course, contains multitudes of possible significances and forgetfulness might reasonably be one but I cannot quite see Fluellen’s forgetting as a sign that the man whom he has forgotten is the sign of forgetfulness itself. Baldo’s argument depends, that is, on the recognition of Falstaff’s significance lying precisely in the fact that he is forgotten and that seems a step too far. It may be a part of what this moment is seeking to effect but Falstaff is here less a sign of that than of a kind of narrative that was already predicated on its ability to be forgotten or feigned to have been forgotten, whether it is namelessly now only an old man or a fat knight. Forgetting Falstaff’s name appears to be the second time in the comparison between Henry and Alexander that Fluellen has forgotten a name: ‘There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth. It is called Wye at Monmouth, but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but ’tis all one, ’tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both.’ (4.7.26–31). Perhaps, of course, Fluellen never knew the name of the river and ‘out of my prains’ is a sign of that ignorance and not a sign of once having known it but now having forgotten it. Not remembering the name of the river at Macedon seems to us forgivable – indeed, I doubt whether any readers of this paragraph could do any better. We can name the river: it was, according to

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Robin Lane Fox, known as Astraea, ‘a famous trout-river in lower Macedon’ and now named Arapitsa, located ‘in the hills of Mt. Bromion above Mieza, the well-watered scene of Alexander’s schooling by Aristotle’.18 But it is more complex than that, for Fluellen is wrong in his comparison between Monmouth and Macedon, though the play’s editors usually miss the point. As Gary Taylor points out, ‘Macedon [is] a region, not a town’.19 Gower is right that Alexander was born ‘in Macedon’ (19–20) but he is not quite answering Fluellen’s question, ‘What call you the town’s name where Alexander the Pig was born?’ (12–13), for he gives, by mistake, the name of the kingdom, not of the town (actually Pella). Gower and Fluellen are, in effect, both wrong. Though Plutarch, to take a source for a biography of Alexander that Shakespeare knew, is clear that Alexander was born in the kingdom of Macedon, he is silent about the name of the town. The name of the river that parallels the Wye is therefore almost unknowable and Fluellen’s ignorance or forgetfulness entirely understandable. We, knowing no more about it than Fluellen, are not surprised that he cannot bring the name of the river to mind. One kind of forgetting, here an attempt to retrieve a piece of information based on the false assumption that Macedon is a town and therefore likely to be something that is not forgotten but impossible to know, soon moves to another kind, not being able to remember the name Falstaff. Quite how forgetfulness functions in Henry V would take my argument further than I wish at this preliminary stage. But forgetfulness is something Henry also predicts just before the start of the battle of Agincourt as he rouses his troops: ‘Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot / But he’ll remember, with advantages, / What feats he did that day.’ (4.3.49–51). Forgetfulness is here not simply a function of age; instead, it forms part of the inevitability of the eventual obliteration of all memory: nothing can survive that process that leads to oblivion. Yet the immediate effect for the old is the possibility of a little embroidering of an old story, those ‘advantages’, how another old man will retell how he fought at Agincourt, something that happens far sooner than Henry here envisages, for Pistol will swear that the wounds he got from being battered by Fluellen had a rather different and more honourable source: ‘And patches will I get unto these cudgelled scars, / And

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swear I got them in the Gallia wars.’ (5.1.83–4). The transmutations of memory, here and in Henry’s analysis both entirely intentional and knowing, cannot resist the unavoidable fact of eventual forgetting. So, sooner or later, Falstaff’s name would be forgotten but not that soon, not then, and not now either. ‘Old men forget’ but what we see in Fluellen’s lapse is an old man forgotten. Fluellen’s forgetting is out of step with the subject of this forgetting. As an old anecdote reported, the standard test for Alzheimer’s of asking someone who is Prime Minister never worked while Margaret Thatcher was in office, for she, like Falstaff, seemed unforgettable.

‘What was I about to say?’ In Hamlet in a scene for centuries usually cut but now usually played, Polonius is giving Reynaldo instructions about how to discover what Laertes is up to in Paris. But he suddenly stops: polonius       … be assured He closes with you in this consequence: ‘Good sir’ (or so), or ‘friend’ or ‘gentleman’, According to the phrase or the addition Of man and country. reynaldo       Very good, my lord. polonius And then, sir, does ’a this, ’a does – What was I about to say? By the mass, I was about to say something! Where did I leave? reynaldo At ‘closes in the consequence’. polonius At ‘closes in the consequence’, ay, marry. (2.1.43–52) Polonius seems to have lost track of his train of thought, switching to prose, and it takes this rather awkward exchange to get him back on track and back into verse. There is, for the audience, usually something distinctly unnerving about the moment. Polonius’s dead

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halt is troubling and it must pass through spectators’ minds that the actor, not the character, has simply forgotten what his next line is. ‘What was I about to say?’ would, then, be an actor’s request for a prompt, perhaps asking the other actor in the scene rather than turning to the prompter. It is far from uncommon for an actor who dries to be given help by a scene-partner so that the far more disruptive disembodied voice from offstage is avoided. Shakespeare seems to me to have built this ambiguity into the lines, asking the audience to contemplate, in this most metatheatrical of plays, an actor’s forgetfulness before coming to realize that it is, potentially at least and depending on the performance, the even more disturbing representation of a person who has lost his way. Michael Bryant’s Polonius, in Richard Eyre’s production at the National Theatre in 1989, was remembered for this moment rather than anything else, when Michael Billington wrote Bryant’s obituary, published on his death in 2002: ‘As Polonius, … he became an aphasia-afflicted Machiavel, whose sudden memory-lapse in mid-sentence had a heartstopping reality.’20 Sean French, writing a diary piece on the production for New Statesman, had a less powerful experience, finding it a wonderful theatrical joke that had the audience half wondering whether the actor had forgotten his lines. For some people, more than half. On the way out I met a theatre critic of a national newspaper whose only comment was to express astonishment at the lapse from an actor of Michael Bryant’s experience: ‘Still, he covered it up pretty well.’21 What for one reviewer was about the character was for another significant only by being about the actor. The ambiguity of the moment plays out in its intense reality, a revelation about the reality of the character or one about the reality of the actor. Precisely the infrequency of watching a Shakespeare character forget leads to Shakespeare’s doubleness at this moment being misread as Bryant’s ‘lapse’ even by a (presumably) experienced playgoer. The intrusion of a kind of awareness of the actor bursting disruptively into the performance is part of the power of such an event, strongly present, I am arguing, in Shakespeare’s text. Bryant’s exploration of the character’s disturbance had progeny. I vividly remember Alan David’s performance of the same moments in Steven Pimlott’s production, starring Samuel West, for the RSC

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in 2001. David’s coolly competent Polonius suddenly became aware of the failure of his memory, of a discontinuity in his own behaviour, and he knew that it was an early sign of the future terror of Alzheimer’s. The hesitation returned on a couple of occasions later in the role and David’s version of the bumbling that so often characterizes Poloniuses became the knowledge, crucially the selfknowledge, that this consummate politician, someone entirely worthy of the confidence Claudius places in him, was quite literally losing his mind, his forgetting placed against the mind-games Hamlet controls and those even Hamlet cannot control in his own mind, creating two parallel tormented selves, each painfully aware, almost hyperaware, of what was going on inside their respective skulls. Central to such an approach is that Claudius’s choice of counsellor cannot be a stupid decision; it might, I suppose, be based on Polonius having knowledge of Claudius’s murder of his brother (though it would need some very adroitly pointed playing to communicate that clearly and unequivocally to the audience). More likely is that Claudius’s trust is well placed, at least until this sign of a fracture in the careful edifice of efficiency and surveillance that Polonius has built up. One could imagine other ways of playing the moment, for example Polonius’ faking the disruption in order to check that Reynaldo has been listening attentively, but it would seem less effective than the frightening forgetfulness I have been describing. Polonius’s response to Reynaldo’s prompt can be angry or unnerved by the disconnection: something like ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I obviously wasn’t saying “closes in the consequence” – but oh yes, I was’, or perhaps ‘Was that really what I was saying? Oh, yes, I remember my train of thought now.’ My quotation of the passage above was taken from the second quarto (Q2, 1604). In the Folio text Reynaldo’s (or, there, Reynoldo’s) prompt is more substantial: ‘At “closes in the consequence”, / At “friend” (or so), and “gentleman”’ (F1, 51–2). Harold Jenkins saw the variant as a product of ‘an actor’s elaboration’ in the F1 text rather than a Q2 omission of something in the manuscript that lay behind it, noting in particular as a sign of the actor’s intervention that ‘Polonius ignores them in taking up the cue’.22 Even if an actor rather than Shakespeare is the source, Reynaldo’s multiple phrases, as Robert Hapgood records, ‘allows for more comic by-play’, giving an example of one Reynaldo who ‘has been taking notes, reads back from them’, though that does not seem to me to exemplify comic

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byplay. More significantly Hapgood’s comment on Branagh’s film (1996) is about shifts in control of the dialogue: ‘Polonius tries to regain the upper hand by treating this phrase as the “correct” answer to his question amid Reynaldo’s scatter-shot recollections’, offering, in effect, a further possible line reading.23 But, in any case, F1’s Reynaldo has not forgotten what was said, even though he cannot know what Polonius was ‘about to say’, and recalls quite a few of the phrases that Polonius has used as, typically, Polonius has overelaborated his point so that the ‘consequence’, what follows from Reynaldo’s hypothetically indicating Laertes’ faults, is two and a half lines before the moment where he broke off. Shakespeare deliberately sets Reynaldo’s memory against Polonius’s forgetfulness. Hamlet himself has a different kind of forgetfulness from Polonius’s, not at an unexpected moment that catches him out but as he tries to complete an extraordinary act of recall, for, having heard the Player speak a speech only once and even though he asks him to begin at a particular line, he will bring the lines of the speech following the starting point back from his memory, first searching for the line, then misremembering it, catching the error and correcting it: If it live in your memory, begin at this line – let me see, let me see – The rugged Pyrrhus like th’ Hyrcanian beast … – ’Tis not so. It begins with Pyrrhus The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms … (2.2.385–90) And then he is off and running, recalling the next twelve lines with, it would appear, no trace of difficulty, even though some Hamlets have him stumble or hesitate a few times as if the actor needs to persuade us that Hamlet’s memory is not superhuman – at least to us, for, in early modern terms, such an act of recall may not be anything like so surprising. And, of course, the Player has no difficulty in picking up where Hamlet leaves off and continuing for the next thirty lines. But it is Hamlet’s error that intrigues. It is not simply that he cannot, at first, get the line right but that he introduces a phrase that does not appear in any of the rest of the speech as given either by him or by the Player. Where does ‘like th’Hyrcanian beast’ come

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from? One route is to think of it in terms of a Hamlet who might well be supposed to be recalling the tigers of Hyrcania from Dido’s complaint in Aeneid Book 4: ‘Hyrcanaeque admorunt ubera tigres’, ‘Hyrcanian tigers suckled you’ (4.367) or, as Marlowe and Nashe put it in their Dido, Queen of Carthage, ‘Tygers of Hircania gave thee sucke’.24 Hamlet, thinking of Pyrrhus’s savagery, something that in its avenging spirit epitomizes what he cannot yet do, reaches for Virgil’s example of a vicious wet nurse, a kind of perversion of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf. And, for the only time in the play, ‘beast’ can be heard as a positive quality. Another route is to think of Shakespeare remembering his own use of the word when York identifies the inhumanity of Queen Margaret in 3 Henry VI, ‘But you are more inhuman, more inexorable, / O, ten times more than tigers of Hyrcania’ (3H6, 1.4.155–6) as well as a reference to ‘The Hyrcanian deserts’ in The Merchant of Venice (2.7.41). Or to think of Shakespeare recalling the line from Hamlet as, in Macbeth, he writes Macbeth’s response to Banquo’s ghost: ‘Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear, / The armed rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger’ (3.4.98–9), where Shakespeare also seems to recall ‘the rugged Pyrrhus’. And here we are deep in the process of Shakespeare’s memory creating a resonance across his work. But does Hamlet recognize his error or does he catch a response from the Player or others of the troupe that suggests he has gone wrong? If the latter, the identification of his forgetfulness needs another’s help. If the former, he corrects himself, feeling something wrong in the regular metre of the line he has incorrectly constructed. My concern here is with the mechanics of identifying one’s own forgetfulness, one’s awareness that, as it were, the act of calling back from one’s memory something not needed for some time creates a momentary dissonance, a sense of the error that, in itself, spurs towards the accurate memory. Hamlet both makes a mistake and corrects it, on his own or with help. Even in the latter he is the one who finds the right line. Again, the act of remembering has that firm touch of realism and hence, for the audience, of recognition: the character is like us because of the ways in which he searches his memory. Given how dominated this chapter has so far been and will continue to be by male characters, I shift to consider a different act of getting a line wrong, misremembering, forgetting the right next

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words of something being recalled, and then correcting oneself, both like and unlike Hamlet’s. In Othello, 4.3, after Othello, Lodovico and their attendants have left, Emilia and Desdemona are left alone on stage for one of the most remarkable scenes Shakespeare ever wrote, the willow scene, as it has come to be known. For more than ninety lines they talk – I might say that they chat – at the day’s end as Emilia unpins Desdemona and prepares her for bed. The nightly ritual, terrible in our knowledge of what is planned to happen that night, involves the complex process of removing the many pins that hold Desdemona’s clothes together, leaving her, at the scene’s end, in her shift, ready for bed. As Carol Chillington Rutter’s superb researchby-practice has conclusively shown, there needed to be rather fewer pins in Desdemona’s clothes than would usually have been the case if Emilia is to have time enough to remove them as the duologue of the dialogue unfolds.25 Not the longest Shakespeare scene for two women – that is probably the conversation between the Countess and Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, 1.3.133–252, closely followed by Portia and Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice, 1.2.1–118 – it is of a different kind. The Countess and Helena have, as it were, a reason to talk, as the Countess probes Helena’s feelings for Bertram, and, though productions find things for Nerissa to be doing while talking with Portia, the primary purpose of the scene is the comic business of the catalogue of the suitors. Desdemona and Emilia, though, do what they do every evening: talk about what’s gone on during the day. The tone of their conversation can vary widely in performance, depending, not least, on what precisely Desdemona means by the adjective ‘proper’ when she speaks of the dinner guest: ‘This Lodovico is a proper man.’ (34). The line unnervingly echoes Iago from early in the play: ‘Cassio’s a proper man.’ (1.3.389). Does Desdemona mean ‘handsome, elegant, well-made’ (OED, 7.b) or something closer to ‘admirable, excellent’, which can be ‘used ironically’ (7.a) or ‘genuine, real’ (7.c (a)) or ‘complete, perfect’ (7.d) or, even, nearer to ‘well-mannered, respectable (occasionally with implication of stiff formality)’ (2.b; OED’s examples for this are much later but that is not fully convincing) – or indeed some combination of all these. As Ridley commented in the 1958 Arden 2 edition, ‘What did Shakespeare intend by this sudden transition to Lodovico?’ Honigmann in his Arden 3 edition is so shocked by its apparent inappropriateness coming from Desdemona that he changes the speech-prefix to Emilia on no bibliographical grounds whatsoever.

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The conversation can take on many different shades, from almost hinting at Desdemona’s flirting with the idea of Lodovico as sexually desirable and then pulling back when the conversation turns strongly to whether women would commit adultery, to something that is always reserved on her part, so that she did not mean by ‘proper’ what Emilia seems to have heard in her reply, ‘A very handsome man’ (34–5). I am more concerned, though, with the song of ‘poor Barbary’ (echo: Iago on Othello as ‘a Barbary horse’ [1.1.110]) which ‘expressed her fortune’ (27) and now clearly ‘Will not go from [Desdemona’s] mind’ (29) as it expresses hers. She is well into the song, interspersing it with comments about Emilia’s progress in the unpinning when this happens: [Speaks.] Prithee, hie thee: he’ll come anon. Sing all a green willow must be my garland. Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve – [Speaks.] Nay that’s not next. Hark who is’t that knocks? emilia It’s the wind. desdemona [Sings.] I called my love false love, but what said he then? (49–54)

Finishing one stanza, Desdemona begins the next, only to realize she’s misremembering what comes next. As Laurie Maguire puts it, from the perspective of her exploration of the meta-theatricality in Othello, ‘And even Desdemona gets lines out of sequence in the willow song, interrupting herself with the (self)directorial correction, “Nay, that’s not next”.’26 For Honigmann the moment has a different kind of valency: ‘a Freudian slip (unconsciously she wants to shield Othello from blame)?’ I will be thinking about Freudian slips in Chapter 3 but I do not see how he can be sure it is an unconscious wish to shield Othello. It will be a very conscious wish – or, more accurately perhaps, a barely conscious one – when Emilia asks her as she is dying, ‘O, who hath done / This deed?’ and she replies ‘Nobody. I myself.’ (5.2.121–2). At that later moment she may not be approving Othello’s scorn but she is certainly out to ensure that ‘Let nobody blame him’. I would rather suggest that this conscious wish

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makes her misremember the next line of Barbary’s song. Like many another – like me when I make such a mistake – she knows that is the wrong line and, after the exchange on the knocking, she moves to the right next line without any scripted hesitation (not the same as meaning that the actor may not perform a hesitation, though I cannot recall or find evidence for an actor making more of it than the text seems to). The right line returns, an accusation from the song’s ‘I’: ‘I called my love false love’. The momentary forgetting and/or misremembering speaks of a desire which, unlike her feelings about Lodovico, seems to me to be unquestionable, her desire not to blame Othello. Potent in the way that her error speaks of her and of the parallel with Barbary that is growing throughout the song as much as through the narrative of Barbary’s love, abandonment and death, the touch of forgetting underscores its power precisely in its realism. In a scene that Rutter rightly describes as ‘nothing less than sensational’, not least in the erotics of the gaze on Desdemona the undressing creates,27 the making visible of the body goes with the making visible of her desire to which the hiccough in the song alerts us. To return to Hamlet and Hamlet’s rather less momentary misremembering, for he searches for the right continuation from knowing that ‘It begins with Pyrrhus’, I want to set against the familiarity of this moment, something it shares with Polonius’ losing his train of thought (and with Coriolanus and Fluellen both forgetting a name), the fact that Hamlet has also imagined a simply impossible kind of forgetting earlier in the play, a passage I quoted earlier (see p. 2):          Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. (1.5.97–104) Hamlet here describes his memory as a writing tablet, effectively as an example of what Stallybrass and Chartier call ‘erasable

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memory systems’.28 Their article brilliantly explores the history of this particular technology in the early modern period and the use of such tables to record maxims and adages, a means of commonplacing and organizing through epitomizing. But there is a moment in their analysis that seems to me to mark a false step. If tables ‘provided an antithetical model of the mind’, it does not follow that they constitute ‘a model of the most unreliable of traces and of human forgetfulness’ (412). When, in 2 Henry IV, the Archbishop of York announces of the King that ‘therefore will he wipe his tables clean / And keep no tell-tale to his memory / That may repeat and history his loss / To new remembrance’ (4.1.201–4), they suggest that ‘As remembrance can be erased from one’s tables, it can be erased from one’s mind’ (412). But the point, surely, is that the Archbishop is imagining the King choosing not to act on such memories, of not making the memories an active part of his political actions, for, crucially, erasure of the memory is not in itself practicable. We can decide what we might want to keep in our memories but we cannot decide actively to forget. Hamlet’s tables, the ones he holds in his hand and uses – ‘My tables! Meet it is I set it down / That one may smile and smile and be a villain – / At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. / So, uncle, there you are’ (107–10) – can be erased and reused. But his initial thought was not about a physical object but about something in his mind, ‘the table of my memory’. Stallybrass and Chartier are right to see Hamlet modelling a tension between the erasable and the permanent. Writing tables are not a place for permanent record and hence Hamlet can ‘wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / That youth and observation copied there’ (99–101). He can move the new information from the erasable space of mental tables to the distinctly more permanent ‘book and volume of my brain’, an action that he may hope or feel confident about achieving. But it does not therefore follow that the temporary space of the brain can be erased with anything remotely like the efficiency with which the writing tables can be wiped clean. The technology works but the command to the brain does not. Active forgetting, the removal of our own memories, is beyond our capacity; only the implementation of and refusal to implement what remains in the mind is within our control. Hamlet, in his whirling response to the encounter with the ghost, goes beyond his own – or anyone else’s – abilities.

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There are ways, as I will explore later, in which some kinds of active forgetting are possible but the total erasure of all but the Ghost’s injunction is something we might terrifyingly imagine but also know not to be possible. The erasing of memories with age (particularly in the area of short-term memory, even as long-term memory seems to become ever more acute, precisely by comparison with the loss of the short-term) or the erasing of both kinds of memories with disease, for example through Alzheimer’s, is never willed and is instead of our being acted upon, not acting. We can work hard to remember particular events, actively engaging with the activity of creating the memory, but not by clearing a space in the banks of our memories by choosing to forget. In fact, as Stallybrass and Chartier note, Hamlet’s mental space is increasingly occupied with ‘baser matter’ that mixes with the commandment on which he places such overwhelmingly unique status as a maxim to be remembered: The ‘Booke and Volume’ in which Hamlet imagines memorializing his father’s command fails to work, while the erasable tables, filled with commonplaces and jests, perform an ever-greater role within the play. (418) And, as the ghost’s commandment becomes increasingly marginalized, the play plays with forgetting its overall dynamic. I have long thought that there is a line missing in the final scene, at the moment at which Hamlet kills Claudius, for Hamlet makes no clear mention of Claudius’s responsibility for Hamlet’s father’s death. We might well be expecting him to say ‘You killed my father’, as Arnold Schwarzenegger does in the parody of the end of Olivier’s film in Last Action Hero (1993),29 or perhaps we too have forgotten the entire play’s motivating drive as well. When Hamlet describes Claudius as ‘murderous’ (F1, 5.2.280), he could as easily be thinking of the death of his mother as of his father and, in the absence of any gloss, we cannot hear the end of the revenge narrative being explicitly marked. The play is, as it were, able to forget its own structure and dynamic. I have deliberately allowed this preliminary exploration of forgetting in Hamlet to move far beyond the initial example, for, once begun to be traced, forgetting proves to thread through the play

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in complex and intriguing ways – and this brief tracing has barely scratched the surface of what Hamlet does with the concept. Rather than, at this stage, seeking some kind of full account, I have wanted to begin to demonstrate how small a part the kinds of forgetting with which I started (Coriolanus’s, Fluellen’s and Polonius’s) will prove to play. For all the sharpness of Shakespeare’s depiction of these quotidian acts, he will prove to be concerned with much larger issues involved in the ways in which we forget, what we forget and how we forget that we have forgotten. The ‘we’ in the previous sentence refers to readers and spectators but also to acts of cultural forgetting, the remembering of what the society as well as the individual forgets or of what the individual remembers that the culture chooses to forget, for here the act of erasure may be deliberate. As the first of two examples of this cultural act and in order to initiate this area of concern, I turn back to Hamlet and to Hamlet’s mocking comment to Ophelia that his father has not been forgotten: Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year! But, by’r Lady, ’a must build churches then, or else shall ’a suffer not thinking on – with the hobby-horse whose epitaph is ‘For O! For O! The hobby-horse is forgot!’. (3.2.125–30) Churches are repositories of the memory of the dead, at least in the form of chantries, like the ones that Henry V has created: ‘and I have built / Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests / Sing still for Richard’s soul’ (Henry V, 4.1.292–4). They are places that locate, literally place, the act of social memory in a way that militates against the risks of social forgetting, of the culture choosing or finding itself unable to remember their high-status dead. The poor have no such place of memory, not even in the lists of the dead when, as after Agincourt, the play and Henry’s nation names the great but not the rest: Edward the Duke of York; the Earl of Suffolk; Sir Richard Keighley; Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name, and of all other men But five-and-twenty. (4.8.102–5)

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The unnamed become unnameable because the records of Agincourt do not name them. They are forgotten, while the four named dead can be differently lamented. In production, even the name of Davy Gam can elicit from the onstage listeners at least a rueful shake of the head at his loss. But I am more intrigued by the hobby-horse that is also forgotten or, rather, by the way that the phrase paradoxically remembers its forgetting. The phrase seems to have been a popular one, for Shakespeare had referred to it in Love’s Labour’s Lost: when Armado sighs ‘But O – But O – ’, Moth interrupts with ‘The hobbyhorse is forgot.’ (3.1.27–8). The OED has no earlier citation than the first extant edition of the play (1598) but Moth’s reply must rest on the audience’s knowledge of the phrase.30 Thereafter it turns up frequently: in Will Kemp’s account of his morris dance to Norwich, Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600): ‘With hey and ho, through thicke and thin, / the hobby-horse quite forgotten, / I follow’d as I did begin, / although the way were rotten.’ (sig. B2b); Jonson used it in the Entertainment at Althrop on 25 June 1603 (‘But see, the hobby-horse is forgot! / Fool, it must be your lot / To supply his want with faces’), as well as in Bartholomew Fair and in the masque of The Gypsies Metamorphosed;31 and it appears in numerous other writers. It might have been a line from a ballad, though no extant ballad uses the phrase.32 Though the phrase is often understood to mean that hobby-horses were no longer part of morris dances, perhaps from Puritan opposition, Alan Brissenden has convincingly argued that the hobby-horse was still part of the early modern morris dance and that the phrase does not describe changes in popular culture through opposition; instead, he shows that it links to the stage in the dance when the hobby-horse costume (with or without the dancer) lies apparently dead, waiting for the moment in the dance when he is resurrected: ‘“Forgotten” does not mean, then, that the horse is left out of the dance itself but that as part of the ritual he is left, “forgotten”, on the ground until he arises, erect and vital once more.’33 Hamlet reaches out to an important moment in popular culture festivities, a sequence of forgetting and then remembering that marks transformation and restoration, almost as a parody of Christ’s resurrection. Hamlet then, in the context of dialogue in which so much of what he says carries sexual overtones, transmutes the reference to mark the transition from childhood to an adult world of sexual

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activity, a space where Gertrude’s (and Ophelia’s) desires now exist, when, perhaps, in one reading of this passage, ‘the toy hobby-horse … is soon forgotten in the lusts of adult sexuality’.34 After all, when Moth brings up the hobby-horse to Armado, Armado asks ‘Call’st thou my love “hobby-horse”?’ and Moth makes clear the difference between Jaquenetta and other women: ‘No, master. The hobbyhorse is but a colt, and your love perhaps a hackney’ (29–31): as a hackney, Jaquenetta is a horse for hire, a whore. It is, then, a phrase that is about individuals, the other characters in the play (Ophelia, Gertrude and, indeed, Hamlet himself) but also about kinds of social change and cultural or collective memory and, to a lesser extent, collective forgetting to which Maurice Halbwachs’s work has been such an important guide.35 Even more powerful, teetering on the edge of the apocalyptic, is my second example of such collective forgetting in Hamlet. As Laertes with a crowd of Danish citizens, ‘a riotous head’ that sweeps in to Claudius’s palace, a messenger rushes in to tell Claudius what is going on:    The rabble call him lord And, as the world were now but to begin, Antiquity forgot, custom not known, The ratifiers and props of every word, They cry ‘Choose we: Laertes shall be king.’ (4.5.102–6) As Thompson and Taylor comment, ‘There is something incongruous about the Messenger’s rather grandiose invocation of Antiquity and custom on the side of this particular king.’36 The messenger’s language makes the call for a democratic vote for monarch – and at the end of the play Hamlet, as he is dying, will anticipate the action of choosing the next King of Denmark, ‘I do prophesy th’election lights / On Fortinbras’ (5.2.340–1) – into something that would create a wholly new world, one where everything that had happened and that constituted the ‘long standing’ (OED, antiquity, n., 1) ‘matters, customs, precedents’ (OED, 6) would have been so completely erased as to be forgotten and unknown, for, in his vision, everything that happens in language is dependent on the support and ratification of antiquity and custom. It would be a revolutionary act of cultural remaking through such fundamental social forgetting.

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Here we are a long way from an old man forgetting what he was about to say, for the rabble and those who hear them know exactly what the implications are of what they are saying. My three examples of forgetfulness – Coriolanus, Fluellen and Polonius – set up an antithesis over the (un)importance of what is forgotten. Supposing we were told the name of Coriolanus’s host, would it materially affect the moment? Does it really matter that it is on ‘According to the phrase or the addition / Of man and country’ that Polonius loses his thread? In neither case is the move into an awareness of forgetfulness significant for what is forgotten; the significance is only that forgetting occurs. But it is obviously the case in Henry V that the audience notes and cares about the substance of what Fluellen forgets. It is not possible to have reached this point in the play without having been aware of Falstaff’s name, even if, for those who know nothing of the impact of his presence in 1 and 2 Henry IV, his name’s import will be far less (and hence why, for example, both Olivier’s and Branagh’s films of Henry V feel the need to counteract this by showing us Falstaff early on, making him more emphatically present, even though both cut the later exchange between Fluellen and Gower). Unlike Coriolanus’s host who never appears and of whom we are told nothing else earlier or later in the play, it matters that it is Falstaff’s name that has been forgotten, perhaps even more than that it is Fluellen who forgets it. Forgetting in such a case draws attention to that which is forgotten even more than that there is an act of forgetting. Fluellen’s case is, in this sense, rather like the following moment in 1 Henry IV: hotspur In Richard’s time – what do you call the place? A plague upon’t. It is in Gloucestershire. ‘Twas where the madcap duke his uncle kept, His uncle York, where I first bowed my knee Unto this king of smiles, this Bolingbroke. ‘Sblood, when you and he came back from Ravenspur. northumberland At Berkeley castle? (1.3.240–6) Hotspur’s anger makes him forget the castle’s name and it matters that, as he flails around trying to recall it, he identifies this place and

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the moment of his being there as the first time he knelt to Bolingbroke. As he nearly remembers where, then, if we have seen Richard II, we can perhaps recall it as the first time Hotspur appeared in the play, his presence there not anticipating his importance in 1 Henry IV but itself anticipated by the identification in the scene before that ‘The lord Northumberland, his son, young Harry Percy’ and other lords have ‘fled to’ Bolingbroke (2.2.53–5). The encounter of Bolingbroke and Hotspur in Richard II also marks another forgetting for Northumberland, fifteen lines into his conversation with his son, noting that Hotspur has not acknowledged Bolingbroke’s presence, asks him ‘Have you forgot the Duke of Hereford, boy?’ Percy’s reply identifies the limits of forgetting: No, my good lord, for that is not forgot Which ne’er I did remember. To my knowledge I never in my life did look on him. northumberland Then learn to know him now. This is the Duke. (2.3.36–40) The scene marks the beginning of a process that will dominate 1 Henry IV: Hotspur’s annoyance towards the King risks his forgetting the appropriate manner in which he should behave towards the King and, though he tries to restrain himself, the anger overflows for more than 130 lines from the King’s exit until shortly after the exchange over Berkeley Castle. The arc of the relationship between Hotspur and Bolingbroke to this point is called back to memory by Hotspur’s forgetting where it began, though he does not forget what happened at that first meeting. The forgetting becomes a means of enabling the audience to mark that sequence and connection, always assuming that individual playgoers are able to remember the scene in the earlier play – and, if they do not, the detail in the exchange in 1 Henry IV will provide an adequate substitute. It is one of Shakespeare’s most brilliant devices to give us backstory, create exposition. Where, say, As You Like It begins with Orlando telling Adam things that Adam knows perfectly well, an example of Shakespeare’s deliberate offhandedness about exposition, here in 1 Henry IV it is created through Hotspur’s anger leading to his being unable to find the name he needs and, as he hammers away towards it, he gives us everything we need to know in a way that is entirely realistic.

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The motif of Hotspur’s forgetting reappears later, as Hotspur settles down with Worcester, Mortimer and Glendower to divide the kingdom: ‘A plague upon it, I have forgot the map’ (3.1.4–5). The map which will prove so contentious in the scene – and for twentieth-century audiences so reminiscent of the postwar divisions of the map of Europe – is brought into focus by Hotspur’s forgetting it and by Glendower’s response, ‘No, here it is’ (6), a response that may, in production, be the result of numerous causes: A map must be physically present … but, since it isn’t clear exactly what gesture accompanies Glendower’s here it is, no [stage direction] is provided. Perhaps he pulls it out from a pouch he wears or merely indicates that it is inside his jacket; perhaps he spots it rolled up somewhere on Hotspur’s person and pulls it out, which would be particularly effective if Hotspur had been anxiously patting his jacket as he searched for it; perhaps the map is already unrolled upon a table and Glendower merely points to it, which would make more obvious the irony of Hotspur characteristically forgetting the very thing that so much exercises him here.37 There is a perverse effect here: to forget is to make the audience remember and, since it will be more than sixty lines before the map comes back into focus in the scene, the marking of its presence looms over the antagonism between Hotspur and Glendower. Forgetting here, as over the name of Berkeley Castle, marks out the significance of what is forgotten, not as a local effect (unlike Polonius or Coriolanus) but as a sign of the structuring of event across the vastness of the architecture of the history cycle in ways that carry import far beyond the individual who forgets into the national politics whose history the play and the plays are engaged in tracing. What seems in one perspective insignificant becomes potent through the echo across the sequence. The moment of forgetting is also a looking back, a reminder of the play’s or plays’ history and its/their structuring of their narratives through connections that are marked precisely by having been remembered to have been forgotten. Again, I risk getting ahead of my argument for this device of using forgetting as a dramaturgical trick to increase emphasis, a drawing attention to the moment in the sequence of the dialogue, is only one of the ways forgetting constructs meaning and event.

2 Forgiving and Forgetting/ Forgetting Oneself

It is time for some numbers, a counting of Shakespearean usages. First, the words that most directly suggest the activities of memory. Shakespeare uses the verb remember (in its various forms: remember, remembered, rememberest, remembers, remembering) 255 times. We can add to that 71 occurrences of remembrance (including remembrances and remembrancer). The 76 occurrences of memory have more forms (adding in memento, memorable, memorandums, memorial, memories, memorize, memorized).1 A grand total of 402. By comparison, forget (including forgets, forgetst, forgetting, forgot, forgotten) yields 220, plus 11 for forgetful (and forgetfulness), to which I would add 18 for oblivion (including oblivious) and 7 for Lethe (including Lethe’d). In all that adds up to 256, marginally over 60 per cent of the frequency for what I might loosely term its opposite. Of course, these words do not cover all moments in Shakespeare that deal with failures of memory. My basic count is not too far off and I have not reread the complete works for the purpose of counting other kinds of occurrence, even though many will appear in this book. I have already suggested that Fluellen’s failure to recall the name of the river at Macedon (see p. 25), because it is ‘out of my prains’ (4.7.29) may be an example of forgetting, and he does not use any of the words I have listed here to describe that absence. Or take, for instance, Sonnet 23:

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As an unperfect actor on the stage Who with his fear is put besides his part … (1–2) This is Shakespeare’s only use of ‘unperfect’. The actor forgets his lines, for ‘unperfect’ is not about excellence (or not) of performance but, as Bottom’s instructions to his actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream show, narrowly about learning one’s lines accurately and completely: after Quince has emphasized ‘here are your parts; and I am to entreat you, request you and desire you to con them by tomorrow night’, Bottom adds ‘Take pains, be perfect’ (1.2.91–2, 100). Actors learned their lines on their own, an activity of study. The aim was indeed to be ‘perfect’, in the sense the OED defines as ‘[h]aving learnt one’s lesson or part thoroughly’ (a. 2.c), with, as one of its earliest examples in this sense, Costard’s comment in Love’s Labour’s Lost ‘I hope I was perfect. I made a little fault in “Great”’ (5.2.554–5). Being ‘word-perfect’, a coupling OED dates no earlier than 1894 (word n.29), involves study. Snug the joiner needs his part as soon as possible, ‘for I am slow of study’ (1.2.63), which OED interprets as the earliest example of the theatrical sense of ‘the action of committing to memory one’s part in a play’ (study n. 6.b).2 Tiffany Stern, in her work on the history of rehearsal, has found numerous examples in the period of this sense of studying3 but her later work also shows that revision to plays tended to change the middle of speeches rather than the beginnings and endings, working along part lines and ensuring that the cues are left ‘intact and so does not force more than one actor to relearn his part’.4 Like Harriet Walter’s transformation of glory into gravy (see pp. 170–1), the beginning and ending of the speech, like that for a word, is a crucial part of the scene’s momentum in performance. When Coriolanus forgets his script and is ‘out’, the standard early modern word for an actor whom we would now describe as having dried,5 he is ‘a dull actor’: ‘I have forgot my part and I am out, / Even to a full disgrace.’ (5.3.40–2). OED quotes this passage for the sense of ‘out’ as ‘In error or at a loss from failure of memory or confidence’ (out, adv., prep., 25.a). In The Nomenclator or Remembrancer (1585), John Higgins’s translation of the dictionary by the Dutch humanist physician and scholar Adriaen de Jonghe, known as Hadrianus Junius, ‘monitor’ is defined as ‘he that telleth the players their part when they are out, and have forgotten: the

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prompter, or booke holder’ (501). The two words, ‘out’ and ‘perfect’, come together when, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Moth, perplexed as to what to say when the Princess and her ladies turn their backs on him as he is trying to deliver a speech, stops short. He becomes ‘out’ in two ways: first, by changing his text, describing the women as turning their ‘backs’ rather than their ‘eyes to mortal views’; then, by repeating a line as he tries to work out what to say next. moth They do not mark me and that brings me out. berowne Is this your perfectness? (5.2.173–4) There are also words which hover phonically proximate to the word groups I have been considering. David Lowenthal, noting that the direction of oblivion is always downward or out (as when someone is ‘consigned to oblivion’), suggests, in a fine passage, that Oblivion’s lexical echoes are just as bad. It recalls Oblomov, that listless prototype of limp passivity. To ‘obliterate’ is to wipe out, expunge, get rid of people or places, things or thoughts. Like obloquy, oblivion sounds objectionable, obnoxious. What is obligatory has the odious overtone of a distressing duty. The very prefix ‘ob’ is mournful and obsequious, obtrusive as an obituary.6 Other words cluster around the sound of forget. Indeed, when counting, I was unsure whether to include ‘forgetive’, a word that Shakespeare probably coined.7 Falstaff, celebrating the virtues of sack, describes its effects on the brain: it ‘makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes’ (2 Henry IV, 4.3.96–8). OED sees the word as ‘of uncertain formation and meaning’, noting most assume it is derived from the verb forge. That seems probable but it might just connect to forget, suggesting that sack makes one forget other things and concentrate on those positive values in the list. It all depends how an actor sounds the g. In Welles’s film Chimes at Midnight (1966), for instance, his Falstaff links it to forget, while Roger Allam’s Falstaff, in Dominic Dromgoole’s production of 2 Henry IV at Shakespeare’s Globe (2010), just as clearly links it to forge. Forge (thirty-one occurrences

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in Shakespeare in various forms), in any case, sits close to forget, again dependent on how that g is sounded, and its doubleness of meaning – positive (to make, as in a forge, OED v.1, 1, 2.a, 3.b) and negative (to fake, fabricate, invent something false, OED, 4–6) – colours some of my thinking about forgetting. Shakespeare certainly uses the word in both senses: compare Cominius on Coriolanus who, attacking Rome, chooses to remain nameless ‘Till he had forged himself a name o’th’ fire / Of burning Rome’ (5.1.14– 15) with the ghost in Hamlet who tells his son that ‘the whole ear of Denmark / Is by a forged process of my death / Rankly abused’ (1.5.36–8); the two converge in a comment on Parolles in All’s Well who will ‘return and swear the lies he forges’ (4.1.22–3). What is faked falsifies the original object, makes one, as it were, forget it. So, too, forgo/forego (eleven in all forms) hovers around the sound world of forget, especially forgot: as Hamlet has ‘forgone all custom of exercises’ (2.2.262–3), he has therefore forgotten his usual way of behaving, his normal workout routine. Most important of all, though, may be forgive (ninety-five in its various forms). It is central to Paul Ricoeur’s project8 that forgetting is intimately, both conceptually and etymologically, connected to forgiving, an intertwining that is apparent in the roots of the two verbs (OE forgietan/forgiefan) and in the proverbial usage of ‘forgive and forget’ that OED tracks back to the thirteenth century Ancrene Riwle (forget, v., 3.b). This chapter will investigate Shakespeare’s explorations of forgiving and forgetting, first when he uses the phrase or a variant of it, then where he explores forgetting oneself and finally where the question of how characters might forgive and/or forget becomes problematized, particularly at the end of comedies such as Twelfth Night. As Douwe Draaisma reminds us in Forgetting: Myths, Perils, Compensations: Even as a verb, ‘to forget’ has no real autonomy. As in ‘forgo’ or ‘forbid’ the prefix ‘for’ in ‘forget’ makes the word mean the opposite of ‘get’. Forgetting is a derivative concept, a negation: it is what you end up with when you think about remembering and then consider its opposite.9 But his emphasis on the ‘for’ form might make us think exactly what is the opposite of ‘give’ in ‘forgive’. As the OED traces it, the verb ‘forgive’ shifts from meaning simply ‘give’ (sense 1) to meaning

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to ‘give up’ (sense 2: ‘To give up, cease to harbour (resentment, wrath)’), before it comes to have a meaning of ‘pardon’ (senses 3 and 4). Not giving but giving up, then, is a position in which the balance of the two verbs forgive and forget would seem often to be difficult to achieve. But in what sense can one forgive and forget, can one manage that delicate balance? The use of the phrase may be a request: please forgive me and forget what I have done. But it may be a statement of doing so: I forgive you and forget your actions. There has been little empirical investigation of what one might do, though one 2015 experiment by a group of psychologists at Munich University looked, to me unconvincingly, at how emotional forgiveness influenced subsequent forgetting.10 It may be comparatively easy to forgive but such active forgetting is, in effect, a fiction. Take one of the most famous stories of Elizabeth I, when she announces very publicly that she has forgotten something: This Earle of Oxford making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth happened to let a Fart: at which he was so abashed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. At his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd, my Lord I forgot the Fart.11 The comment is wry, a way of deliberately embarrassing the Earl. It is also very funny. But I find it odd that it can be used on a popular website as an example of how the Queen ‘could be forgiving too’.12 What it is not is a statement of having forgotten anything. Quite the reverse: it reminds the Earl, her courtiers and us what she has remembered. And in the act of remembering the forgiving is simply a sovereign’s indifference to the original offence that sent the Earl rushing away from court. The phrase ‘forgive and forget’ does not appear in the Bible. But the concept most certainly does, as, for example, in Hebrews 8.12: ‘For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and I will remember their sins and their iniquities no more’, as the Geneva Bible, probably the one most familiar to Shakespeare, phrases it. Plainly ‘I will remember their sins … no more’ does not indicate that God will forget, for there is no concept of a God who does not remember everything. Forgetting here means something else, a willingness to perform a pretense of obliviousness, a refusal to make what is remembered active in the consideration of the future: the sins and iniquities will not be forgotten but they will not signify,

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they will be drained of weight in the actions God will take. But it cannot be forgetting in the way we usually understand it. While I was searching for something connected with forgive and forget on the web, my eye was caught by a T-shirt slogan: ‘Forgive and forget? I’m neither Jesus nor do I have Alzheimer’s.’ Though it is not a good idea to consider a weak joke too closely, it is striking that its formulation places forgiving but not forgetting with Jesus, making forgetting into only a human failing rather than a divine choice. As Avishai Margalit explores forgiving and forgetting in the last chapter of his powerful study The Ethics of Memory, he points out that the Hebrew Bible uses two very different words for God’s forgiveness and one person’s forgiving another. The former is salakh, with the probable original sense of ‘to wash’, the latter nasa, a word with the more usual meaning of ‘to bear’ or ‘to carry’.13 As he develops his analysis of the range of meanings forgiveness carries, he suggests that [t]wo religious models of sin and forgiveness still permeate the concept of forgiveness in present-day humanistic morality: forgiveness as blotting out the sin, and forgiveness as covering it up. Blotting out a sin means forgetting it absolutely. Covering it up means disregarding it without forgetting it. (188–9) As he suggests, ‘In deletion the written material is totally erased, while crossing out leaves traces of the error under the crossing-out line. Blotting out is analogous to deleting; covering up is like crossing out’ (197). So, he argues, ‘the image of covering up is conceptually, psychologically, and morally preferable to the picture of blotting out – that it is better to cross out than to delete the memories of an offense ….[and that] forgiveness is based on disregarding the sin rather than forgetting it’ (197). Margalit is more concerned with forgiveness than with forgetting but he is intrigued by the contrast between God’s willingness to forget and willingness not to forget. On the one hand, as in Jeremiah 31.34, ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and will remember their sins no more’. And on the other, in Isaiah 49.14–15, ‘But Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me. Can a woman forget her child, and not have compassion on the son of her womb? Though they should forget, yet will I not forget

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thee.’ Margalit connects the Hebrew word for womb, rechem, with the word for mercy, rachamim, the two sharing the same root. So forgetting here is double: the Lord will not forget the person who has sinned but will forget the sin, a separation that will be crucial in one of Shakespeare’s uses of the phrase. Margalit ends up, helpfully, with ‘four different pictures of forgiveness in the Bible: as carrying a burden, as covering up, as blotting out, and as cancelling a debt’ (191). But he also wants to contrast forgiveness as a voluntary act with forgetting as an involuntary one. ‘I can voluntarily think of a white elephant, but I cannot follow the instruction not to think of a white elephant’ (201). Hence there is a paradox in the connection for forgiving and forgetting, one that I shall return to later. All five of Shakespeare’s experiments with this balancing act of the two forg- words, forgive and forget (and the concomitant evasion of the third: forge) are intriguing and well worth tracing, a superb example of the ever-increasing complexity and thoughtfulness with which Shakespeare works with a phrase across his career. I make no apology for looking at all five, not least because the detail of each is so revealing of Shakespeare’s thinking about this act that in itself produces moral debate. When Queen Margaret, in 3 Henry VI, tells Warwick ‘Warwick, these words have turned my hate to love, / And I forgive and quite forget old faults, / And joy that thou becom’st King Henry’s friend’ (3.3.199–201), she performs forgetfulness but, as the repository, throughout this play and Richard III, of all remembering we might place a little more trust in her forgiving than her forgetting, even though that quite must here be intended to persuade that she ‘fully, entirely’ forgets (OED quite, adv. A.I. and A.I.1 ‘indicating thorough completion of an action’), rather than that much later nineteenth-century sense, now much more common in British English, of ‘moderately, somewhat, rather’ (OED III). In Richard II, Richard attempts – or wishes to appear to be attempting – to make Mowbray and Bolingbroke ‘purge this choler without letting blood’: Forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed; Our doctors say this is no time to bleed. (1.1.153, 156–7)

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The jingling rhyme is comic, perhaps weakly so, perhaps deliberately so weak; in performance it often makes Richard’s flatterers laugh. The four imperatives suggest parallels: forget is like forgive as conclude is like be agreed. But the pattern does not quite work: there can be conclusion without agreement or agreement without conclusion, and there can be forgiveness without forgetting but only forgetting without forgiveness if one forgets first, a temporal sequence that verges on the impossible: how can one continue not to forgive but already have forgotten? Either way, the couplet is not entirely convincing. In a fine reading of the passage, Doug Eskew suggests two structures simultaneously present: first, there is parallelism in which ‘conclude elaborates on forget, and be agreed elaborates on forgive’, so that forgetting is a form of limitation and forgiving as coming together; second, there is chiasmus, where ‘[f]orgetting … makes for being agreeable, and forgiving is that which limits’.14 Richard is arguing that Mowbray must be forgiven and his actions forgotten over an event that Shakespeare chooses not to have dramatized (the murder of Gloucester) but in which the King’s complicity must be apparent to the audience for Shakespeare’s scene to make sense. I see Richard’s flippancy as itself a sign that the forgive-forget duo cannot operate: can one really place a limit on memory here? For the death is powerfully evoked, especially in performance – not least in Gregory Doran’s 2013 RSC production with David Tennant as Richard, where the scene plays out with Gloucester’s coffin onstage and the Duchess, his widow, kneeling helpless in grief beside it. The very invitation or command to forgive and forget manifests its own impossibility. In All’s Well That Ends Well, at the start of the long final scene, the King praises Helena and tells the Countess, speaking of Bertram’s actions, that ‘I have forgiven and forgotten all / Though my revenges were high bent upon him, / And watched the time to shoot’ (5.3.9–11). He expands on it further, as Lafeu speaks of Helena’s ‘dear perfection’:              Praising what is lost Makes the remembrance dear. Well, call him hither. We are reconciled, and the first view shall kill All repetition. Let him not ask our pardon. The nature of his great offence is dead,

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And deeper than oblivion we do bury Th’incensing relics of it. (19–25) Dr Johnson did not approve of the King’s decision here: ‘Decency required that Bertram’s double crime of cruelty and disobedience joined likewise with some hypocrisy, should raise more resentment; and that though his mother might easily forgive him, his king should more pertinaciously vindicate his own authority and Helen’s merit.’15 But the King both is and is not announcing the end of the punishment of Bertram’s ‘offence’, since, while the King can perform an act of oblivion, that is not the same thing as eliminating the memories, ‘Th’incensing relics’, which will not disappear on command. ‘Relics’ is a complex word here, covering a number of parts of OED’s definitions for the period: it must retain part of the Catholic sense of pieces of a saint that are holy and deserving of veneration (OED, n. 1.a), also ‘A precious or valuable object … or beloved person’ (1.c), ‘Something kept as a remembrance, souvenir, or memorial’ (1.d), ‘That which remains or is left behind, esp. after destruction’ (2.a), and ‘The remains of a person’ (3.a). Helena’s corpse, something to be praised and venerated and remembered, cannot be placed neatly in a space paradoxically offered as ‘deeper than oblivion’ (for what can be deeper than oblivion?). The timehonoured phrase – ‘forgiven and forgotten’ – seems to deny its own accomplishment. As Jonas Barish rightly points out, in the King’s lines, ‘forgetting’ has little to do with actual failure of memory. The King remembers well enough – no doubt painfully, stingingly – how Bertram has misbehaved, yet he proposes to proceed as if he has truly forgotten … oblivion thus signalling not a literal loss of remembrance so much as the deliberate casting out of a longsmouldering anger.16 King Lear uses forgive four times: the blinded Gloucester asking the ‘Kind gods’ to ‘forgive me that and prosper’ Edgar (3.7.91); Lear planning life with Cordelia in prison, ‘When thou dost ask me blessing I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness’ (5.3.10–11); Edmund, later in the same scene, saying to his opponent, as yet

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unidentified, ‘If thou’rt noble, / I do forgive thee’ (5.3.163–4); and, most powerfully and movingly, Lear earlier to Cordelia, at the end of their scene of reconnection to each other, ‘Pray you now, forget and forgive; I am old and foolish’ (4.7.83–4). As so often in this play, the sheer simplicity of the language intensifies the emotional affect that the audience receives through it. The words could not be much plainer: a common invocation of request, an almost clichéd phrase, a moment of self-identification. Like, say, Edgar’s ‘I would not take this from report: it is, / And my heart breaks at it’ (4.6.137–8) or, in 4.7, Cordelia’s ‘And so I am, I am’ or ‘No cause, no cause’ (70, 75), Shakespeare invests an affirmative statement or, in Lear’s case, a request with overwhelming force. Here there are no awkward overtones to ‘forget / And forgive’, except, just possibly, at least at this moment in my argument, in the inversion of the verbs: all OED’s early examples are ‘forgive and forget’. Finally, most complexly and astonishingly, there is the use of the phrase in The Winter’s Tale. At the start of 5.1, as we see the court of Sicilia for the first time after the ‘wide gap of time’ (5.3.154), Leontes enters, accompanied by Paulina, as we might expect, as well as the double act of Cleomenes and Dion, plus some ‘servants’.17 Even if we remember Cleomenes and Dion from half a play earlier – and we could be forgiven for having forgotten them – we might not anticipate that it would be Cleomenes, rather than, say, Paulina, who will open the scene’s dialogue: Sir, you have done enough, and have performed A saint-like sorrow. No fault could you make Which you have not redeemed; indeed, paid down More penitence than done trespass. At the last Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; With them, forgive yourself. (5.1.1–6) My choice of phrase just now about an audience’s pardonable forgetfulness – ‘we could be forgiven for having forgotten them’ – was rather heavy-handedly predictive, anticipating Cleomenes’ remarkable reformulation of the conventional trope, ‘forgive and forget’, a phrase so familiar as to be almost a cliché or perhaps already fully slipping over that invisible line into cliché, here

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managing to avoid that threat by turning ‘forgive and forget’ into ‘forget your evil … forgive yourself’. Cleomenes’ encouragement to Leontes to ease off on the intensity of his penance gets this response: leontes    Whilst I remember Her and her virtues, I cannot forget My blemishes in them, and so still think of The wrong I did myself … (6–9) Cleomenes’ separation of the terms of the phrase is especially provocative: on the one hand there is the evil of the actions which warrants forgetting; on the other there is the self that can be forgiven, an act of self-forgiveness. Barish suggests that ‘remembrance here constitutes a form of piety and Leontes’ stubborn refusal to forget becomes the badge of an authentic conversion’,18 but I find the word ‘blemishes’ undercuts that. Cleomenes’ strong phrase ‘your evil’ – I think of Kent to Lear: ‘I’ll tell thee thou dost evil’ (1.1.167), the aggression magnified by the use of ‘thou’ from subject to monarch – is modified and ameliorated by Leontes’ word, for ‘blemish’ means here, as OED puts it (n. 3 fig.), ‘A moral defect or stain; a flaw, fault, blot, slur’, the defect suggesting something less powerful, less absolute than ‘evil’. OED indeed quotes under this sense one of the two earlier uses of the word in the play, Leontes’ promise to Camillo ‘I’ll give no blemish to her honour, none’ (1.2.339), though Paulina will use the word as a verb to describe Mamillius’s reaction to Leontes’ doing exactly what he has promised not to do: … the young prince, whose honourable thoughts – Thoughts high for one so tender – cleft the heart That could conceive a gross and foolish sire Blemished his gracious dam. (3.2.192–5) Here the word carries a possible legal sense (OED v. 4.c): ‘To cast a slur upon, asperse, defame, discredit, disable.’

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And does Leontes’ phrase ‘the wrong I did myself’ mean ‘the wrong I myself did’ or ‘the wrong I did to myself’? The latter again weakens the force of Leontes’ state of self-understanding, hinting even at a form of self-forgiving that Cleomenes thinks he has not yet achieved. Yet what is also significant and meaningful in the use of the phrase in The Winter’s Tale, unique in Shakespeare’s work, is the status of the speaker. Unlike Queen Margaret, King Richard II, the King of France or King Lear, Cleomenes is not a royal but usually defined, in editors’ lists of characters, as a lord in Leontes’ court or something similar. Yet again I turn to the OED where the linking of forget and forgive produces a perfect example for my purpose of the further link with royalty, a usage by Abraham Fleming in 1576: ‘Hee did both forgive and forgett offences committed against his majestie.’19 But it is also the case that such a usage of the phrase in connection exclusively with royalty (for Cleomenes is speaking to and of the King) is unusual. I searched on EEBO TCP (Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership) for the phrase ‘forgive and forget’ up to 1623, i.e. the year of the Shakespeare First Folio. My search was limited strictly to its use as a three-word phrase. I found no usages of ‘forgiving and forgetting’ and, apart from Shakespeare’s one, only one other of ‘forgiven and forgotten’. I note, of course, that none of the other Shakespeare usages would appear as a result. A more sophisticated proximity search of, say, ‘forgive’ within five words of ‘forget’ would produce a much larger set of examples, and so too would adding in ‘forgiven’ within five words of ‘forgotten’. But, whatever the statistical weaknesses of my search, it does pick up the primary phrase, from which the other versions derive and therefore has its own validity. The search generated eighty-one hits. I read through them and sorted them into just three capacious categories: usages of the phrase in a context that was broadly theological, e.g. in sermons and commentaries and books of instruction for Christian gentlemen and the like; usages directly connected with royalty (as it were, the field defined by the five Shakespeare examples); and the others left over. The results showed no fewer than sixty-three in the first group, a mere five in the second (including the one by Shakespeare) and a remaining random accumulation of thirteen. In other words, Shakespeare’s predilection for using the phrase in a context where

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the speaker or the spoken to is always royal is aberrant to a possibly marked extent and, though it might well shift with the results of a proximity search, it would, I quite reasonably suspect, still look odd. I then reversed the phrase, making it ‘forget and forgive’, with the firm expectation of not finding many of this formulation. Actually, the numbers turned out to be fairly similar: sixty-three hits, over half theological, only seven ‘royal’. There was a further immediately apparent result that intrigued me. In my category of thirty others, from both the searches, seven were in the works of a single writer, Robert Greene. Greene clearly did use the phrase frequently and one of those was in one of the most often reprinted short works of fiction in the period, Pandosto or The Triumph of Time, the novella that was Shakespeare’s source for The Winter’s Tale: ‘but the King whose conscience was a witnesse against him of his witlesse furie, and false suspected Iealousie, was so ashamed of his rashe folly, that he intreated his nobles to perswade Bellaria to forgiue, and forget these iniuries: promising not onely to shew himselfe a loyall and louing husband, but also to reconcile himselfe to Egistus … ’ (sig. C3r). First printed in 1588, it precedes all of Shakespeare’s uses, as do Greene’s other examples of the phrase, and I am left wondering whether Greene’s predilection for it affected the young Shakespeare. To return, though, to Cleomenes. Like Lear and Richard, Cleomenes is asking someone else to forgive and forget and, unlike any of the others, he is asking the person to forgive himself and forget what that person has done, not to forgive someone else or forget that other person’s actions. As long as Leontes fails to act as King it is somehow appropriate for Cleomenes to take on the royal role of encouraging, even if not commanding, forgiving and forgetting, especially when he aligns the request with divine actions, though quite how he knows what ‘the heavens have done’ is never explained and thus becomes a vulnerable analogy. And how, in any case, can the evil be forgotten other than by forgetting Mamillius, something the play tries hard but effectively fails to do? There is here, as in the other examples, a power relationship in the use of the phrase but one that is here inverted, with the King being made to consider forgiving himself and forgetting for himself – and that is part of the point, a sign of a King currently unable to act as King. What Cleomenes’ phrase offers my discussion is its place as a sign of the frequency with which Shakespeare is intrigued by the

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concept of forgetting oneself, both in OED’s usage 5.b (‘To lose remembrance of one’s own station, position, or character; to lose sight of the requirements of dignity, propriety, or decorum; to behave unbecomingly’) and in versions OED here seems not quite to cover, as, for example, Hamlet’s ‘Horatio, or I do forget myself’ (1.2.161). Richard McCabe’s Hamlet (directed by Bill Alexander, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 1998) was not a close friend of Horatio; he recognized him, as one might a fellow student seen at lectures or in the dining hall, though the friendship would grow across the course of the performance, as the friendship with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern collapsed. His Hamlet’s comment was a courteous touch towards someone who would like to have been noticed by the Prince. It may be embarrassment or a warm celebration of a Horatio who mattered so much to many other Hamlets, just as much as recognizing himself. It may be something slightly more troubling and deeper: not to recognize his friend would be a sign of not knowing his own self, as Horatio will be a crucial part of the journey through the action for someone whose investigation of how he knows himself and how he forgets himself is central to Western culture. Late in the play he will use the same turn of phrase to Horatio, this time of Laertes: But I am very sorry, good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot myself; For by the image of my cause I see The portraiture of his. (F1, 5.2.75–8) Here Hamlet does not want to have ‘behaved unbecomingly’, to borrow OED’s phrase, but the reason for the regret is the recognition of likeness: I should not have done so because my desire for revenge and his are parallel, though, as Harold Jenkins notes, ‘The irony, which Hamlet does not remark on but which we can hardly miss, is that the image which shows Laertes as a revenger like Hamlet must also show Hamlet as revenge’s object.’20 Again and again, but most especially in the Histories, this sense of forgetting is linked to status figures, as OED’s definition so strongly suggests. So, to take one example (as it happens, OED’s earliest example of the form), when, on his return from Ireland, Richard II hears from Salisbury that the Welsh troops have left the day before, his response to Aumerle’s ‘Remember who you are’ is

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I had forgot myself. Am I not king? Awake, thou coward Majesty, thou sleep’st! Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names? Arm, arm, my name! A puny subject strikes At thy great glory. Look not to the ground, Ye favourites of a king. Are we not high? High be our thoughts! I know my uncle York Hath power enough to serve our turn. (3.2.83–90) Switching from the sestet he had created to answer Aumerle’s ‘Why looks your grace so pale?’ (75), Richard is no less extravagant in his elucidation of what it means to remember himself, to deny the forgetting. Recovering himself is not to change the nature of his register of discourse. In both cases he is still himself, even if the first underplays that self that being king is, the self he cannot ever forget in the play and which becomes the topos for his prison soliloquy as much as for his subtextual meaning in the deposition scene, where ‘Ay, no. No, ay; for I must nothing be’ (4.1.201) carries also the sense ‘I know no “I”’. Even more intriguing is Queen Elizabeth’s question to Richard III, ‘Shall I forget myself to be myself?’, with his sharp response: ‘Ay, if yourself’s remembrance wrong yourself’ (Richard III, 4.4.420–1). To be offered the role of Richard’s mother-in-law is to forget his murders of her children. The entwining of the familial self and the self’s status in the kingdom produces the paradox, in an extended dialogue that both makes the audience recall the earlier wooing of Anne (remembering it and marking the differences between the two, for Shakespeare is not interested simply in repetition) and makes the speakers worry at what cannot be forgotten. As much as Richard may hope for or assume Elizabeth’s forgetfulness, a willingness not to think of such things, the language keeps troublingly pointing back to the histories, individual and national, that have led to this point. As, for instance, Elizabeth asks, using the legal term for the conveyance of title, ‘Tell me what state, what dignity, what honour, / Canst thou demise to any child of mine?’ (4.4.247–8), so we can hear the sense of ‘death’ that hovers around demise, a sense that is particularly associated with the death of a sovereign (‘the demise of the crown’, see OED n. 2, quoting a 1547 Act: ‘the Death or Demise of the Kings of this Realm’). And Richard’s response somehow inevitably emphasizes the need to forget:

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Even all I have – ay, and myself and all – Will I withal endow a child of thine; So in the Lethe of thy angry soul Thou drown the sad remembrance of those wrongs Which thou supposest I have done to thee. (249–53) The waters of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, here seem to flow through Elizabeth herself, through her soul, as if she could will forgetfulness within herself, the condition Richard is shaping, one that is controlled by his one polysyllable in his final line, ‘supposest’, a word on which an actor might effectively lean. As Adrian Poole notes, the word Lethe often in Shakespeare ‘involve[s] the imminent pressure of violent grudge’.21 There is the anger of King Henry V with the Lord Chief Justice who imprisoned him before: ‘What – rate, rebuke and roughly send to prison / Th’immediate heir of England? Was this easy? / May this be washed in Lethe and forgotten?’ (2 Henry IV, 5.2.69–71). But, as well as its normal sense of the name of the river in Hades whose waters ‘produced, in those who drank it, forgetfulness of the past’ (OED n. 1), the word could also mean, simply, ‘death’. For this sense, marked ‘rare’, the OED quotes only Shakespeare in Julius Caesar: ‘and here thy hunters stand / Signed in thy spoil and crimsoned in thy lethe’ (3.1.205–6). There is a transference happening here: death to blood to Hades to oblivion – with the hunters coloured crimson by the blood that is the sign of Caesar’s death. Most early modern dictionaries gloss Lethe simply as the river in Hades but John Florio, in A World of Words (1598), avoids that and offers ‘mortalitie, death, pestilence, oblivion’ and Randle Cotgrave copies that, more or less, in his 1611 French and English dictionary.22 The fact of death itself is a move towards forgetfulness, not only through drinking the waters of the underworld river. Caesar himself possesses his own Lethe which the assassins bathe in. In this way, Lethe is part of that area of thought of ‘forgetting oneself’, the place of ease and lethargy as well, as in the Ghost to Hamlet on the dullness and fatness that goes with it: ‘duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed / That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf’ (1.5.33–4). Self-forgetting is set against not only remembering oneself but also knowing oneself. As Thomas Rogers explores it in his Philosophicall Discourse, entituled The Anatomie of the Minde (1576),

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Knowe thy selfe, and thou shalt not offend; forget they self, and what wilt thou not do? Neither reason from sicknesse, not religion from ungratiosnesse can holde thee back. Art thou an Aristides for uprightness? forget thy selfe, and what are thou but an Acteon for covetousnesse? A Lucretia for chastetie? forget thy self, and thou shalt be a Messalina for incontinence. A Caesar for clemencie? forget thy selfe, and thou are a Nero for crueltie … At one worde art thou a man? forget thy selfe, and what are thou but a beast? And such a beast, as surpasseth all beasts in beastlinesse.23 Shakespeare is far less concerned with forgetting events than with forgetting one’s own identity, one’s character, one’s status, one’s relationships and associated forms. Take, for example, all four examples in As You Like It; Rosalind’s sadness unless Celia can ‘teach me to forget a banished father’ (1.2.5–6) but her preparedness to ‘forget the condition of my estate to rejoice in yours’ (1.2.15–6); Duke Senior’s willingness to ‘forget this new-fall’n dignity’ (5.4.174), and even Amiens’s song that sees the frost as something ‘That dost not bite so nigh / As benefits forgot’ (2.7.186–7). Three of the four are forgetting current circumstances and hence define the condition of the speaker as a result of that forgetting. Forgetting what has happened is, strikingly, a rather rarer inflection. Hence, for instance, in King John, where forget is used seven times, all present tense, none forgot or forgotten, Shakespeare insists on the connection with the self: the Bastard choosing to be forgetful, ‘And if his name be George, I’ll call him Peter, / For new-made honour doth forget men’s names’ (1.1.186–7); King John telling the Bastard off for his taunting of the Duke of Austria, ‘We like not this, thou dost forget thyself.’ (3.1.134); Constance, in the extreme agony of her grief, repeatedly worrying about the edge of madness, I am not mad; I would to God I were, For then ’tis like I should forget myself. O, if I could, what grief should I forget! … If I were mad, I should forget my son … (3.4.48–50, 57) and Hubert confronting Salisbury over the dead body of Arthur, with a reciprocating identification of forgetting a self, for if

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Salisbury forgets himself, then Hubert will forget Salisbury’s status and worth: Stand back, Lord Salisbury, stand back, I say! By heaven, I think my sword’s as sharp as yours. I would not have you, lord, forget yourself, Nor tempt the danger of my true defence, Lest I, by marking of your rage, forget Your worth, your greatness and nobility. (4.3.81–6) Whatever else is happening over memory and forgetfulness in this play, the risks attendant on forgetting one’s identity (Salisbury, Constance, Bastard) or behaving with a willingness to forget others’ (Bastard, Hubert) are of great import. At other times Shakespeare’s concern is with how we seek to forget what is painful, to try to obliterate the pain of the past or the threats of the present – and how reminding another can be a weapon of power. There is Prospero brutally calling back to Ariel’s mind past experiences: Dost thou forget From what a torment I did free thee? …               hast thou forgot The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy Was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her? … (1.2.250–1, 257–9) Or Miranda forgetting Prospero’s orders, ‘But I prattle / Something too wildly, and my father’s precepts / I therein do forget’ (3.1.57–9). Or Prospero temporarily able to have forgotten what Caliban and company are plotting but recalling it just in time, even in the middle of the betrothal masque, ‘I had forgot that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates / Against my life. The minute of their plot / Is almost come’ (4.1.139–42). I shall return to The Tempest in Chapter 4 (see pp. 132–7). There is a further way in which one might forget oneself and that is through distraction. As Jonathan Baldo has shown, distraction had a range of early modern senses, including what the OED defines as ‘diversion of the mind or attention … less commonly = diversion,

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relaxation’ (distraction, n. 2.a).24 That is certainly an available early modern meaning and he interestingly explores how, for instance, Iago ‘makes a career of distraction, … continually diverting Roderigo’s attention …, diverting Desdemona … at Cyprus, creating a diversion that leads to Cassio’s downfall, and distracting Othello in the sense of pulling him asunder’.25 But across Shakespeare’s forty-four uses of the word (including distract, distracted, distractedly, distraught, etc.) that sense of the word as diversion does not occur. Shakespeare’s primary interest is the word as ‘violent perturbation or disturbance of mind or feelings, approaching to temporary madness’ (OED 4) and ‘mental derangement; craziness, madness, insanity’ (OED 5). Baldo’s argument, perceptive though it is, is, perfectly reasonably, not rooted in Shakespeare’s own use of that sense of the word. There are exceptions. In Antony and Cleopatra, while Antony’s rage offers an opportunity, as Maecenas advises Octavius, to ‘Make boot of his distraction’ (4.1.10), there is a very different sense when a soldier tells Canidius that Octavius’s ‘power went out in such distractions as / Beguiled all spies’ (3.7.76–7), linking back to the earliest sense of the word as ‘a drawing or being drawn asunder’ (1.a), here as ‘a severed or divided form’ (1.b, quoting this passage as its only example). The same underlying sense is also there when Enobarbus tries to argue Antony out of fighting by sea because it would ‘Distract your army’ (3.7.43), indicating here something like division and perhaps confusion. In Othello Iago’s description of gardening includes the possibility of planting a plot with a single species or one could ‘distract it with many’ (1.3.324), where distract means divide. In only one case might the sense of ‘diversion’ be present and, even there, I am far from sure it is. When Hamlet wonders whether ‘memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe’ (1.5.96–7), obviously the ‘distracted globe’ is both Hamlet’s head and the world as a whole. It is also, equally clearly, a metatheatrical reference when the play was performed at the Globe (as it is now when performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in London). The force of distracted in this last possibility might remind us that the anti-theatricalists saw the theatre as a site of sinful distraction, a place where, as Baldo argues, the mind was seen as being divided (140) and confused. Above all, though, ‘distraction was a form of forgetfulness, one that caused dispersion and disintegration of the self’.26 How much of the self disappears during distraction, what is forgotten and missed, varies

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widely. Lear when distracted still identifies himself as king, knowing his title, but he may not know the name Gloucester: ‘Goneril with a white beard?’ (4.5.96). John Wood (RSC, 1990) made the line a search for the name. He knew it was not Goneril and he knew it was someone whose name began with G but the right word would not come back to him. In his distraction, the forgetting of a name seemed only inevitable. Hamlet’s distraction is much more powerfully problematized. When he apologizes to Laertes we may find his argument valid or specious, certainly the latter if the madness is too completely a fake. ‘[P]unished with a sore distraction’ (5.2.208) is one thing but the claim that it exonerates him from the consequences of his actions, that the Hamlet who is not Hamlet is not the same self, is a troubling manoeuvre: Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet. If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it. Who does it then? His madness. If’t be so, Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged – His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy. (5.2.212–18) The mad may not be responsible in law for their actions, precisely because they are not themselves. But that does not absolve them from the guilt of the criminally insane. Forgetting himself does not make Hamlet any the less the killer of Polonius, even if it might be manslaughter rather than murder. But in madness, whether temporary or prolonged, the self and its consciousness of itself precisely as a coherent self is marked by division, the tearing apart that is distraction. In forgetting, power matters but not only power over one’s self. Whether that power includes forgiveness or the fiction of legal forgetting is another matter. In 1660, as part of the aftermath of the Civil War and the restoration of the monarchy, the Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion would serve to create a legal forgetting of the Interregnum. There had been no such law in England before, though there was a Scottish example in 1563, ‘ane statute law and ordinance of perpetual oblivioun’.27 Earlier

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there was some awareness of the possibilities of a legal amnesty, as when William Fulbecke describes how Cicero ‘procured a decree to be made after the example of the Athenians, which they called their Amnestia, that the killing of Caesar shold be forgotten & forgiuen, and this was ratified by Senate’.28 But it does not need the laws of oblivion or the concept of amnesties to create the awareness of how forgiving, forgetting and the power of the state are intertwined, even though such laws conveniently exemplify this political act of social forgetting and forgiving. I turn briefly to consider how Shakespeare creates a problematic form of forgiving and forgetting in the endings of comic – or at least supposedly comic – action, in Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing and Measure for Measure. I begin with someone we think we can forget. When Viola first comes onstage, she talks with the captain who has rescued her, about whether her brother might still be alive, about her plans to serve Orsino and so on. At the scene’s end he leaves, never to return. It is a common device in Shakespeare and almost any other early modern dramatist: create a character as an interlocutor to help with the exposition, what we would now think of as the backstory, and with setting up the next stage in the narrative, then get rid of them because they have done their job. Think of Archidamus who appears to talk with Camillo in the opening scene of The Winter’s Tale and then leaves for good. Or both Philo and Demetrius who appear in the first scene of Antony and Cleopatra and never by name thereafter. We are so used to it that I doubt whether anyone watching Twelfth Night ever thinks for a moment ‘I wonder what happened to the Captain’. We forget about him and justifiably so. The word ‘captain’ is spoken later but only to describe Antonio’s actions, in the sea battle against Orsino’s fleet, ‘A baubling vessel was he captain of’ (5.1.50). Then, unexpectedly, that earlier Captain turns up, not in person but in dialogue as Viola sets out to prove who she is: ‘which to confirm / I’ll bring you to a captain in this town, / Where lie my maiden weeds’ (249–51). If, as usually happens, the actor playing the Captain doubles the priest who marries Sebastian and Olivia and who is present onstage at this point, then the audience knows that the Captain is not about to appear, since the actor is already there.29 And then, even more unexpectedly, it turns out that the Captain is entangled in the narrative around Malvolio and Viola has somehow picked up on the information about this:

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The captain that did bring me first on shore Hath my maid’s garments. He upon some action Is now in durance, at Malvolio’s suit, A gentleman and follower of my lady’s. (270–3) And everyone remembers, Olivia in particular, that they have all forgotten about Malvolio. As the confusions are clarified – and the way that Feste cannot forget and makes Malvolio remember what Malvolio said about him to Olivia and how his revenge on Malvolio is a sign that ‘the whirligig of time brings in his revenges’ (371–2) – so Malvolio shows that he will not forget or forgive in his threatening exit line (how threatening depending on performance but often casting a real pall over the play’s last moments): ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.’ (373). Orsino’s concern – ‘Pursue him, and entreat him to peace’ (375) – is far less a generous act or a consequence of Olivia’s assertion that Malvolio ‘hath been most notoriously abused’ (374) than it is a worry about where to find Viola’s dresses: ‘He hath not told us of the captain yet’ (376) – pragmatic, not exactly sympathetic, but single-minded about the future need to turn Cesario fully into Viola, at least as fully as clothes can manage in creating gender. There is something here that is unforgiving and unforgetting, unwilling and unable to move beyond the chaos, a position that cannot quite resolve itself. Each production finds its own way of representing that discomfort to a greater or lesser extent. Each finds how much forgiving there can be and how much has been forgotten. In thinking about the end of Much Ado, I am continually intrigued by Margaret and the ending of her journey through the play. So what do other characters make and what might we make of Margaret’s role in the play-acting scene at the window? When the plot comes to light, Leonato blames Margaret but Borachio defends her: leonato    This naughty man Shall face to face be brought to Margaret, Who I believe was packed in all this wrong, Hired to it by your brother.

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borachio    No, by my soul she was not, Nor knew not what she did when she spoke to me, But always hath been just and virtuous In anything that I do know by her. (5.1.291–7) Margaret, according to Borachio, whose account of her share in the matter may or may not be truthful, has simply been indulging in sexy role play in which she plays Hero to Borachio’s Claudio. So what does Margaret think when she sees the results of her action in the church? The play-text doesn’t explicitly give her an entrance but it would be odd if she were not attending on her mistress at her wedding, especially as we have watched her dressing Hero for the wedding just before. In Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film, Imelda Staunton as Margaret is seen rushing away from the wedding, horrified at what she has done. But she does not say anything. She could have stopped the disaster, just as, in Othello, Emilia could have told Othello and Desdemona what happened to the handkerchief when she realizes how serious her theft of it has proved to be. We see Margaret again later in the play, in 5.2, when she has a conversation with Benedick, making bawdy jokes and voicing her ambition to be more than a waiting gentlewoman: ‘Why, shall I always keep below stairs?’ (5.2.8–9). Even though we know – and we know that she knows – what the outcome of her actions has been, there is no reference to it, nothing that speaks directly of her guilt or remorse, nothing that shows why, in our estimation, she might deserve to be forgiven and her actions forgotten. She is, as it were, the same old Margaret, the one the audience saw on the wedding morning – and that might make us feel more than a little uncomfortable. I have seen Margarets who play this scene covering up their real regrets, some onstage alone and weeping before Benedick comes on and the light-hearted witty conversation begins. In Matthew Warchus’s 1993 London production, Margaret was mourning outside Hero’s monument, trying to be witty with Benedick but clearly crushed by her part in the events. In a 1992 production in Washington, Margaret tried to sneak away from the house, carrying

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a suitcase, but ‘thought better of it and came back to sit down despondently in the garden’. When Hero entered in the final scene, this Margaret ‘crossed swiftly over to her and knelt, kissing the hem of Hero’s dress and murmuring contritely while Hero smiled in token of forgiveness’.30 Creating such a substantial subtext is possible and entirely reasonable but it fills what in the play is an absence, a lack of language to engage with the consequences, at least in 5.2, one of those moments that we can feel Shakespeare ought to have written but which he chose not to write. At the start of the last scene, Leonato makes clear that he knows the limits of her responsibility: ‘But Margaret was in some fault for this, / Although against her will, as it appears / In the true course of all the question.’ (5.4.4–6). That sounds fair enough, depending on how we understand his phrase ‘against her will’. We would now tend to understand it to mean that she must have had to be persuaded to do it, though she didn’t want to. But, as the OED makes clear, sometimes it could have a different meaning: ‘in opposition to (one’s own) inclination or liking, unwillingly (rarely, against one’s purpose, unintentionally)’.31 So, it could, though rarely, have a sense of unintentionally, and I think it does in Much Ado. Since Margaret did not know what Borachio was trying to do when they had that conversation at the window, she cannot be blamed for her actions. She did not have to be forced to do it, she did it willingly but with consequences (not least because there were observers of whom she was unaware) that were on her part unintentional. And that means she can be forgiven and her role in it forgotten. But it still does not quite tell us what to do about her silence. That is the unforgiveable and unforgettable action. That is where the limits of responsibility come into play. That is where being a silent bystander is not enough. Her silence may not be, for the audience, forgivable, even if it is for Leonato. Inevitably, for it is so characteristic of the play, Measure for Measure makes forgiving and forgetting even more problematic. The play is much more concerned with the possibilities for forgiveness than with forgetting. Frequently enough we hear almost clichéd comments about how forgiveness functions. Confronted with Angelo’s implacability over the capital sentence on Claudio for fornication, Escalus, who might by seniority have been the acting ruler during the Duke’s absence rather than Angelo, says ‘Well, heaven forgive him, and forgive us all’ (2.1.37), a line of no especial

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import but he completes the couplet with one of those paradoxical inversions that speaks to the central and disturbing confusions in the play: ‘Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall’ (38). Forgiveness itself may be paradoxical, as when the pimp Pompey comments ‘I do find your hangman is a more penitent trade than your bawd; he doth oftener ask forgiveness’ (4.2.48–50), a reference, of course, to the hangman’s asking forgiveness of the condemned just before he executes them, though, since the hangman’s work is fully authorized by the state and judiciary, there is nothing for which to ask forgiveness, a separation, in effect, of the agent from the act. At the play’s end the Duke twice speaks of forgiveness. The first is to Lucio who, for the slanders against the Duke that he has uttered, has been condemned by the Duke to marrying the prostitute he made pregnant and then to be whipped and hanged. lucio I beseech your Highness, do not marry me to a whore. Your highness said even now I made you a duke; good my lord, do not recompense me in making me a cuckold. duke Upon mine honour, thou shalt marry her. Thy slanders I forgive and therewithal Remit thy other forfeits. (5.1.515–21) Forgive, yes, but not forget, I assume. The Duke then, unexpectedly, asks Angelo to forgive the provost, at exactly the point at which the parallel between Lucio and Angelo is most marked as both are made to marry and narrowly avoid execution: ‘Forgive him, Angelo, that brought you home / The head of Ragozine for Claudio’s. / Th’offence pardons itself.’ (533–5). ‘Th’offence pardons itself’ is another unexpected manoeuvre. It does because, though the provost ignored a specific instruction of Angelo as his superior in the state, he did it on the instruction of the Duke in disguise. Angelo may or may not gesture his forgiveness, for he has no line of response to the Duke’s command to forgive. It is part of the bizarre twists and turns the action of the play achieves in its final moments, not least in the Duke’s completely unanticipated offer of marriage to Isabella, an offer repeated immediately after the order to Angelo to forgive. As so often in Shakespeare, the absence of a stage direction to explain

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Isabella’s silence in response to this twice-repeated proposal leaves a space for the actors to fill. In the absence of the assured act of forgiving, Shakespeare leaves a space in which we may wonder about the selves that the characters have forgotten to be. There is one further, final and significant area of forgetting oneself that I need to mention. When early modern writers considered performance – and those who did were most commonly anti-theatrical – their primary anxiety was over the ways in which performance made the playgoers, the spectators of this to them unedifying spectacle, forget themselves in the lethargic posture that made one ‘succumb … to pleasure in a way that promises damnation if he fails to remember both his death and the last judgment’.32 As William Rankins put it in A Mirrour of Monsters in 1587, the spectator’s idleness ‘maketh him … to forget his own condition & former deedes’ or, as a marginal note says, ‘playes maketh them forgette GOD’.33 Exactly the same sentiment is there in Anthony Munday’s A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theatres (1580): ‘[we] so defile our lives with wickednes, that we utterlie forget both GOD and our selves.’ (36).34 It is not that the play is forgotten, but that the play makes one forget the moral state and the values that one has failed to live up to. Theatre is, then, a diversion that creates forgetfulness of what lies outside the theatre. But theatre also creates the conditions for forgetting itself, something I turn to later. As Stephen Orgel argues, while memory has long been recognized ‘as a basic element of artistic creativity, … forgetting, or the suppression or subversion of memory, is an equally essential creative principle’ both for Shakespeare and his audience watching his dramaturgical practice.35 His drama is structured on what is or is not able to be remembered and what is inevitably forgotten. Yet, even though this is central for the experience of the play in performance, it is not something of which Shakespeare speaks directly. A final turn to this chapter. Forgiving and forgetting have become so powerfully part of our world that it seems to me impossible not to mention it. We view Shakespeare’s approach to such matters through the lens of our world’s redefinitions. The concept of forgiving and forgetting now manifests itself so clearly as an act that can be profoundly and transformingly political,

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where its earlier versions were enunciations of the continuities of power and authority. It is there in South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission which began its work in 1996 and was an astonishing commitment to hear but not necessarily to punish the acts of state violence that apartheid institutionalized. We now forget that, though the Commission could grant amnesty, it did so in only some 12 per cent of the cases it considered. For all the criticisms levelled against it, especially by victims’ families, it spoke in its very existence of a transformation of the state apparatus and of a new attitude to the judiciary in this wholly new state. It could never forget but it could choose to forgive. In October 2018, visiting the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, a museum devoted to the appalling history of the Pinochet regime in that country, recording its massive inventory of disappearances and torture, I saw a display wall showing thirty countries that similarly had their own versions of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, including Chile itself. In such moments the recurrent need to forgive and not to forget is powerfully and humanely performed. In Jorge Luis Borges’s last interview, the interviewer commented on Borges’s sustained anti-Peronist position that ‘I thought … that you’d forgiven a little’. Borges replied, Forgotten, not forgiven. Forgetting is the only form of forgiveness, it’s the only vengeance and the only punishment too. Because if my counterpart sees that I’m still thinking about them, in some ways I become their slave, and if I forget them I don’t. I think that forgiveness and vengeance are two words for the same substance, which is oblivion.36 Borges’s redefinition of the unforgivable into the needing to be forgotten to be freed from the slavery of the other is immensely powerful. It connects for me with the redefinition offered by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in the moving postscript ‘Reflections on Forgetting’ that he added as a ‘Prelude in a Tentative Mode’ to his 1982 study of ‘Jewish History and Jewish memory’ Zakhor. Yerushalmi is concerned with how a people’s collective forgetting is a failure ‘to transmit what they know out of the past to their

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posterity’.37 Hence the importance for him, as he points out it was for Freud too, of the school at Yabneh for the study of Torah after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce, one of three moments at which the Torah was first forgotten and then retrieved. At the end of these powerful ‘reflections’, Yerushalmi mentions a question posed by journalists at Le Monde, polling people as to whether ‘forgiving or justice … best characterizes your attitude’ to the Occupation of France in the Second World War and Yerushalmi wonders about that choice: Can it be that the journalists have stumbled across something more important than they perhaps realized? Is it possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering’, but justice? (117) The juxtaposition of the two terms as opposition is differently formulated by Milan Kundera as he carefully defines ‘Forgetting’ in his list of sixty-three words that have been important to him.38 Kundera starts from a comment by his character Mirek in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’ but he then shows that Mirek himself is in a paradoxical relationship to forgetting as he both struggles ‘to make sure he is not forgotten’ and ‘is at the same time doing his utmost to make people forget another person’, his ex-mistress.39 Kundera creates a history of forgetting: ‘before it becomes a political issue, the will to forget is an anthropological one’, for, in what Poole beautifully defines as a ‘summary paradox’,40 ‘Forgetting: absolute injustice and absolute solace at the same time’. Going, unknowingly, beyond Yerushalmi’s formulation and Borges’s need not to forgive but to try to forget, Kundera’s paradox of the simultaneity of forgetting as injustice and as consolation has the kind of paradoxicality that has the profound humanity we applaud in Shakespeare. Mirek’s unawareness of the contradictoriness of his wishes seems part of the deformation of the personal and the political in the Sovietist state. It manifests what Kundera wishes to forgive and what he is unable to forgive across that terrible time. As he puts it in his novella Slowness in defining our times’ relationship between forgetting and speed:

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I recall the well-known equation from one of the first chapters of the textbook of existential mathematics: the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting. … our period is given over to the demon of speed, and that is the reason it so easily forgets its own self. Now I would reverse that statement and say: our period is obsessed by the desire to forget, and it is to fulfil that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; … it wants to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory.41

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Forgetting about forgetting This chapter, as it explores the history and theory of forgetting, may seem to marginalize Shakespeare who will put in appearances only from time to time. But my intention here is to hint at rather than explore the interconnections with Shakespeare’s works and reception. In so many ways, we (by which I mean both individuals and communities) keep forgetting about forgetting. Here is the first of three examples of the phenomenon. When a new academic journal, Memory Studies, began publication in 2008, its first issue set out to sketch the field into which the journal was intended to have an impact: as the Editorial put it, ‘we have invited scholars distinguished by their writings on memory from an array of disciplines to contribute short articles setting out their views on the agenda, challenges and prospects for the field and its core issues’.1 One of the pieces, Paul Connerton’s ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’,2 was indeed ‘richly provocative’,3 sufficiently so to elicit three substantial responses in the third issue. Connerton, a social anthropologist, sets out to show that the forms of cultural memory and cultural forgetting are not opposed as a value system in which memory is positive and good while forgetting is bad and a mark of failure. But he is also concerned to show that forgetting is not ‘a unitary phenomenon’ (59). He chooses the pleasing but arbitrary number of seven types – William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is lurking distantly behind this but also, more immediately, D. L. Schacter’s widely cited article ‘The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights from Psychology and Cognitive

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Neuroscience’ and his popular book, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers.4 Connerton ends his taxonomy with a recognition that the choice of seven ‘makes no claim to comprehensiveness’ and offering ‘an invitation to think of further types’ (70). To summarize very briefly a typically thoughtful and complex argument, Connerton’s seven are: (i) Repressive Erasure, as under totalitarian regimes (referencing Milan Kundera) but also as in the spatial organization of the Metropolitan Museum in New York which marginalizes non-Western art. (ii) Prescriptive Forgetting, also an action by a state but one ‘believed to be in the interests of all parties to the previous dispute’ (61), as after the restoration of democracy in Athens in 403 bce ‘it was forbidden to remember all the crimes and wrongdoing perpetrated during the immediately preceding period of civil strife’ (62). (iii) Forgetting constitutive in the formation of a new identity, here seen as a positive through discarding ‘pieces of an old jigsaw puzzle that, if retained, would prevent a new jigsaw puzzle from fitting together properly’ (63), as in the lack of knowledge of ancestors in some South East Asian societies or in modernity’s subtext of forgetting, itself the subject of Connerton’s then-current work.5 (iv) Structural Amnesia, seen in the ways that an individual ‘tends to remember only those links in his or her pedigree that are socially important’ (64), male lines in patrilineal cultures like the British peerage, female in a matrilineal society like the Lamba, but also in the history of cookbooks. (v) Forgetting as Annulment, the consequence of ‘a surfeit of information’ and therefore the inverse of (iv) which depends on a deficit, and seen in Nietzsche’s ‘cultural nausea … [with] antiquarian historical scholarship’ (64–5), but also the history of archives and the storing so central to contemporary information technologies and the discarding that is part of the disciplinary processes of the natural sciences.

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(vi) Forgetting as Planned Obsolescence, fundamental to capitalist systems of consumption in the creating of new consumer products and the obsession with the new that becomes socially necessary and hence sustains the industry generating such products. (vii) Forgetting as Humiliated Silence, the ‘covert, unmarked and unacknowledged’ way in which social behavior deals in a state of bewilderment with the consequences of defeat, as in the unwillingness of German writers postwar to deal with the ‘campaign of destruction’ by the Allies or the ignoring of the ‘10 million mutilated men’ in the aftermath of the First World War who were ‘ghosts haunting the conscience of Europe’, even as the continent developed rituals of commemoration of the war dead but not the war maimed (69). I offer the list because the kinds of cultural forgetting that Connerton sets out are important for considering Shakespeare, all of them needing to be engaged with and underpinned with a more elaborated reference, and some of which I have already started to interlace with my analysis, as, for instance, in his brief pointing towards Kundera in (i) (see pp. 70–1). That some of the seven are perhaps a little too briefly explored in Connerton’s article is only a sign of the kind of intervention he is making. Connerton’s purpose is in part to demonstrate that we have forgotten to engage with forgetting as a crucial and complex cultural phenomenon. But the responses published in the journal, offered by five clinical and/or cognitive psychologists,6 can, loosely, be characterized by a concern to underline the vast gulf between the disciplinary concerns of psychology and those of social anthropology. The most sympathetic, by Erdelyi, looks back at the history of psychology’s consideration of forgetting, primarily in classic work by Ebbinghaus in 1885 and Bartlett in 1932, especially the latter’s argument for forgetting as a consequence of ‘cumulative reconstructions of successive rememberings which, over months and years, resulted in a progressively less faithful rendition’, what Erdelyi dubs ‘forgetting-by-false-remembering’ (274). Erdelyi sees Connerton’s exploration of forgetting as ‘adaptive stratagem’ as a parallel to psychologies such as, most obviously, Freud’s, and he connects this with the motivation the individual has to erase earlier memories in order to create new ones, a motivation that

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he differentiates from the ‘desperate motivation, as is found in historical-political struggles that lead to or stave off mayhem (some of Connerton’s examples) or in clinical case histories (as in Freud’s)’ (275).7 Erdelyi finds congruence between psychology’s consideration of the strategies of oblivescence/reminiscence that the individual uses and Connerton’s cultural concerns. Singer and Conway are rather more concerned with psychology’s distinction between availability and accessibility, between, that is, the ways in which encoding in long-term memory does not ensure that the information can be retrieved when needed, and they see this distinction as one that Connerton has omitted, though they do not show why cultural forgetting needs such a distinction, only that work on individuals’ forms of memory and forgetting proves to need it. Wessel and Moulds demonstrate that experimental psychopathology, their own field, leads to attempts to ‘understand phenomena through the development of models that describe mechanisms and processes, rather than through classification’ (288). Their interest is in ‘commonalities’ and therefore approach data in ways radically different from Connerton’s, so that his invitation to find more types of forgetting ‘even struck us as a potential pathway to further confusion’ (288). As they identify the gap between what Connerton explores and their own methods, they are left, finally, with an encouragement ‘to develop a uniform language with which to conceptualize memory processes at the level of the individual and the group’ (293). But, in effect, they are much more concerned with the individual than the group, where Connerton’s concerns tend more to emphasis on the group, on social structures of forgetting, than on the individual. So his 2009 monograph on ‘how modernity forgets’ is structured into two large forms of forgetting, ‘temporalities’ (40–98) and topographies (99–131), each of which is explored in ways that are dazzlingly wide ranging and in which the individual brain processes are accorded little attention by comparison with his concern with, for example, how ‘[f]orgetting is built into the capitalist process of production itself, incorporated in the bodily experience of its life-spaces’ (125). The lack of productive connection between Connerton’s work and the respondents’ is most immediately seen in the latter’s failure to enjoy the playfulness of Connerton’s work. His article’s structure

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foregrounds its own arbitrariness which cannot possibly be a formative control for their writing. Yet what is most striking about the exchange – or, rather, the effective absence of exchange – across the four pieces is what happened next. In the period of much more than a decade after Memory Studies gave space to Connerton (I presume by invitation) and his respondents, it did not publish a single article centrally concerned with forgetting. After this opening gesture, it simply forgot forgetting. Of course, it is not necessarily a requisite of a journal called Memory Studies, which has continued to explore both cultural and psychological approaches to memory, that it habitually engages with its lesser partner of forgetting studies. Here, fully aware of the triviality of the example, I have offered this history of a journal’s absence of concern as an indication of cross-disciplinary difficulties and the attendant disengagement from a proffered avenue of connection. My second example is of forgetting forgetting in plain sight rather than through a cumulatively perceptible – but not locally visible – absence. Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting is one of his greatest achievements.8 His complex thinking about the perception of history as an interplay between, as it were, foregrounding and backgrounding, that which is overwhelmingly remembered and that which recedes as the narratives of history are themselves constructed over time, begins from the book’s frontispiece, a baroque sculpture in Wiblingen Monastery in Ulm, showing Kronos being stopped from tearing a page out of a book by the figure of History, described by Ricoeur as ‘entre la Déchirure par le Temps ailé et l’Écriture de l’histoire et son stylet’, between the tearing of winged Time and the writing of history with her stylus (ix). His consideration of the phenomenology of memory, both personal and collective, leads him through questions of the relations between history and epistemology, and the forms of representation undertaken by the historian, in particular the work of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory and Pierre Nora on the places of memory (or, as in the English translation of Nora’s collection of writings, Les Lieux de mémoire, when it became Realms of Memory9). Ricoeur is more than four hundred pages into his delicate, beautiful exploration of history and memory before he turns to forgetting in the last chapter of Part 3 (412–56), a study he continues into the Epilogue which concentrates on ‘Difficult Forgiveness’.

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Ricoeur knows that forgetting ‘remains the disturbing threat that lurks in the background of the phenomenology of memory and of the epistemology of history’ and that it is therefore ‘the emblem of the vulnerability of [the historical] condition’ (412). Crucially, he divides what he calls ‘profound forgetting’ in two, a polarity between ‘forgetting through the erasing of traces and a backup forgetting, a sort of forgetting kept in reserve’ (414), a division to which he keeps returning. But he is also concerned by the intertwining of memory and forgetting: ‘Certain facts … lend credit to the paradoxical idea that forgetting can be so closely tied to memory that it can be considered one of the conditions for it’ (426). Certainly he is made anxious by forgetting and, in particular, the question of whether there can be, in parallel to the notion of happy memory, something like happy forgetting. He moves, in the very last stages of his argument, towards describing ‘a wish for a happy forgetting’, something he must ‘confess’ (500), as if the desire is itself part of the wish he must resist, the wish for a happy ending. As he uncovers the weaknesses of the assumed polarity between memory and forgetting, celebrating, as he does so, Harald Weinrich’s literary history of forgetting, Lethe,10 so he toys with the idea of a balance to ars memoriae in an ars oblivionalis. Through it he moves finally to Kierkegaard’s ‘praise of forgetting as the liberation of care’ in his Upbuilding Discourses (505), with Ricoeur sensitively aware of how care-full forgetting might need to be and how difficult it would be to achieve this in an ethical form in which the intimate interweaving for forgetfulness and forgiveness would be achieved: ‘Carefree memory on the horizon of concerned memory, the soul common to memory that forgets and does not forget’ (505). Viewed from its ending, Ricoeur’s strategy in Memory, History, Forgetting is, in one sense, subtle and effective, its choice to be forgetting forgetting for so long functioning as the necessary and justifiable structure of deferral of the crucial step needed to complete the argument until the latest possible moment. Yet I cannot but feel a nagging anxiety that he has also, for so much of the length of the study, been avoiding confronting the sheer difficulty and irresolution of the philosophy of forgetting that he finally offers, something that shadows the rest of the argument through its prolonged absence. And as he might, from this perspective, be seen

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as evading forgetting, so we are aware of the book’s argument as a forgetting of forgetting in the sheer length of that deferral of the confrontation with a concept in many ways so much more complex than the other two pillars of the work: memory and history. In other words, Ricoeur may be unable to keep forgetting forgetting even while he may be desiring to forget it and the consequence may be that the reader also forgets forgetting, becoming more engaged by the writing on memory and history than by the turn back to what has been forgotten until the very end, a device that can make forgetting less than climactic and almost an afterthought. The work’s underplaying of forgetting can then be its weakness, not a strength in its structuring of its investigation. Ricoeur does not address how he is placing (or deferring placing) the third leg of his tripod. My third example comes from the work of Benedict Anderson. Near the beginning of his influential study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, first published in 1983, he quotes from the classic essay by Ernest Renan (1823–92), ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, first given as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882: Or l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien de choses. [Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.] And, in a footnote, he quotes from the succeeding passage: ‘tout citoyen français doit avoir oublié le Saint-Bathélemy, les massacres du Midi au XIIIe siècle’ [every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century].11 Anderson returns in passing to Renan towards the end of the book: ‘That today’s Vietnamese proudly defend a Viêt Nam scornfully invented by a nineteenth-century Manchu dynast reminds us of Renan’s dictum that nations must have “oublié bien de choses”.’12 But, strikingly, given how important concepts of historical memory and the refusal of memory, a kind of national forgetting, would seem to be for his argument, he has virtually nothing else to say about it.

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In 1991 Anderson published a new edition of the book, now with two additional chapters or, as he termed them, ‘appendices’. The second, now standing as the book’s last chapter, is entitled ‘Memory and Forgetting’. Its origin was the humiliating recognition that in 1983 I had quoted Renan without the slightest understanding of what he had actually said: I had taken as something easily ironical what was in fact absolutely bizarre. The humiliation also forced me to realize that I had offered no intelligible explanation of exactly how, and why, new-emerging nations imagined themselves antique.13 Anderson approaches his reconsideration of Renan through Jules Michelet whose ‘focus of attention’ in his discussion of ‘second generation’ nationalists ‘is always the exhumation of people and events which stand in danger of oblivion. [Michelet] sees no need to think about “forgetting”’ (199). Renan stands in opposition to Michelet for ‘it was precisely the need for forgetting that preoccupied him’ and Anderson quotes again the passage from Renan, now italicizing ‘doit avoir oublié’. His perception now is that the ‘bizarre’ quality of Renan’s sentence lies in the brevity with which Renan alludes to the St Batholomew’s Day massacre and to the extermination of Albigensians instigated by Pope Innocent III, thereby assuming that his French audience and readership would pick up the allusion to events three hundred and six hundred years before and the ‘peremptory syntax’ in which he announces that each French citizen doit avoir oublié (not doit oublier) – ‘obliged already to have forgotten’ – which suggests … that ‘already having forgotten’ ancient tragedies is a prime contemporary civic duty. In effect, Renan’s readers were being told to ‘have already forgotten’ what Renan’s own words assumed that they naturally remembered! (200) As Anderson perceives, the religious conflicts to which Renan so concisely alludes were wars between ‘fellow Frenchmen’, who therefore constitute both killers and killed. Since the events are not automatically remembered, Renan is effectively identifying ‘a systematic historiographical campaign, deployed by the state mainly

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through the state’s school system, to “remind”’ young French people of slaughters which are part of their national history (201). One is being obligated to forget at the same time as one is being constantly reminded. ‘Awareness of being embedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of “forgetting” the experience of this continuity … engenders the need for a narrative of “identity”’ (205). The paradox of the national requirement to have forgotten is precisely that it is equally balanced by the national structures that enforce remembering – and both are equally necessary as a part of the narrative of nation (and I point here to the title of the volume for which the translation of Renan I have used was made: Nation and Narration). As narrative, the moments of history have made a classic metamorphosis into myth; hence, Anderson suggests, why Renan does not say that this action of being obligated to have already forgotten could use the Paris Commune of 1870–1, for, in 1882, the year in which Renan delivered his lecture, ‘its memory was still real rather than mythic’ (201). What Anderson so superbly manages – with an astonishingly honest perception of the inadequacies of his own earlier forgetting (or, perhaps better, ignoring) of what Renan was so complexly suggesting, an honesty that all academics might wish to emulate – is to reinscribe forgetting at the centre of his project through an ‘appendix’ that becomes the climax of the book. He has not revised the book further, only added a 2006 ‘Afterword’ on the travel history of the book. Having forgotten forgetting he remembers it and gives it its due importance as a crucial part of the implication of forgetting in national remembering: ‘to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must be remembered/ forgotten as “our own”’ (206). Anderson’s rethinking of what it might mean supposedly to have already forgotten what it is clear the nation remembers echoes, for me, that forgetting by Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1 that remembers what might have otherwise functioned only as forgetfulness for the audience (see pp. 40–2). The act of demonstrating what has been forgotten or is being forgotten functions dramatically and theatrically as a manifestation of the significance of remembering. We are reminded of characters’ forgetting precisely so that we should remember.

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Remembering forgetting My three examples of forgetting forgetting have marked my wish to draw attention to Connerton, Ricoeur and Anderson, all major figures in the understanding of the social functions of forgetting for the individual within a social structure, a structure of, as it were, the activity of civic living within a framework of forgetting. There are many others who, similarly, ostensibly offer an interest in forgetting and yet, for a variety of reasons, fail to deliver that. There are figures like John Frow, for instance, whose fine study of Time and Commodity Culture ends with a chapter subtitled ‘Repetition and Forgetting’. Mostly concerned here with the appalling consequences of false ‘retrieved’ memories of childhood sexual abuse, Frow glances only briefly at forgetting, marking it as ‘an integral principle’ of the model of data that ‘are arranged and rearranged at every point in time’ – and then he moves on, never to return to forgetting again, whatever the chapter title might have promised.14 I note here that, like the individuals discussed so far, the scholars, philosophers and theorists I will be mentioning in this line of enquiry are overwhelmingly male – would it were otherwise! The necessary fourth to place beside the three figures I have so far been concerned with, someone who never forgot forgetting but whose focus was unremittingly on the individual within social structures that are dominantly familial rather than civic and cultural, is Freud, again someone whose thinking I have already glancingly mentioned. Freud is always concerned to uncover the acts of remembering having forgotten, of recording the gaps that forgetfulness marks, for in that record of absence something is being marked that, for him, unquestionably demands the analyst’s attention, not least when the analyst is also the analysand. Of course, current experimental psychology does not accept Freudian readings of the significance of forgetting as an act of repression. As Alan Baddeley put it in a lecture as far back as 1988, Freud suggests that much forgetting occurs because the events concerned are associated with unpleasant events that evoke anxiety, and call up an automatic process that bars them from conscious awareness. In his ‘Psychopathology of everyday life’, Freud reports many incidents which he attributes to repression.

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I am afraid, however, that attempts to demonstrate repression under more controlled conditions have not proved particularly encouraging.15 Nothing in the thirty or so years since has altered that position, only more strongly underscored it. But the power of Freud, particularly in literary studies, has not diminished, not least, I would argue, because the act of reading critically, within a context in which meaning is held not to be fully apparent on the surface of the act of language, is common both to Freudian analysis and to literary criticism. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was first published in periodical form in 1901, as a book in 1904 and revised and enlarged an astonishing seven times between 1907 and 1924. Unlike Anderson’s addition of two chapters to Imagined Communities, the republications of The Psychopathology of Everday Life were as a result a kind of charting of the addition of stories, examples, vignettes throughout the volume. As Paul Keegan suggests, its ‘vertiginous extensions evinces a fear of closure, as if to finish would be to fail to have convinced the reader’.16 The result is that, unlike any other of Freud’s works, even those others often revised such as The Interpretation of Dreams, it reads at times like an almost random accumulation of data, an unstoppable and unshaped flow of examples within each broad category defined by its chapter headings. So, for example, the chapter concerned with ‘Forgetting Names and Sequences of Words’ (chapter 3) begins with some pages detailing a couple of examples and then, to prove that examples of his own forgetting names can reveal a ‘relation of the name to my person’ that ‘is unexpected and is usually conveyed by superficial association’, Freud begins a series of ‘a few simple examples’ as ‘the best way to clarify its nature’ (25), numbering in all not ‘a few’ but nineteen examples, some of which are not of his own forgetting at all but have been reported to him by others. A brief final paragraph and the chapter is over. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is then rather like a joke book; for Shakespeareans it might remind us of Tarlton’s Jests (earliest extant edition 1613) or any of the dozens of other early modern jestbooks – or even of Shakespeare’s Jests or the Jubilee Jester, a collection of more than 150 pages of jokes with Shakespeare as the central character, probably published in 1790. The book is also, as this example of the string of examples shows, determinedly autobiographical: Freud is his own patient, patiently

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elucidating meanings he perceives in his own Freudian slips, the parapraxes that are the material of quotidian error. As Keegan suggests, it is a ‘comedy of errors’, in which ‘the individual scene is the isolated slip’: The repressed returns, but this time as farce. If the Oedipus complex represents our lives as consolingly tragic, then the parapraxis presents everyday life – the placeless place where we live, flickeringly, partially – as disconsolately comic. (xi) It is a social comedy that may indeed be formed as a joke, but even the analysis of the forms of Freud’s writing may itself reveal its own unconscious slips. When Keegan sums up the comedy of these daily events by writing that ‘parapraxes occur where our unconscious gangs up with circumstance, and gets to ridicule us merely for getting up in the morning and agreeing to appear on the stage of the day’ (xii), I notice that in the midst of his sentence occurs an act of forgetting, presenting itself as ‘for getting up’, the choice of phrase itself apparent as a distortion of forgetting, warranting a questioning of what is at this point being repressed, but also becoming a forgetting of the material he is concerned with Freud being concerned with. Shakespearean comedy, not least The Comedy of Errors, is, for the most part, carefully conscious – and usually sharing this consciousness of the playwright with his characters’ awareness – of its wit and the wittiness of its errors. The Dromios, for instance, know very well that they are being funny. But there are examples elsewhere of the many ways in which language surprises its speaker, makes him/her aware of what unexpectedly is distorted or makes us aware of what, say, Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing does not know he is saying. When Bottom muddles his senses as he awakes from the experiences of the wood – ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’ (4.1.209–12) – the confusion is not just its distortion of St Paul to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 2.9) but also a representation of a synaesthetic transposition that Bottom is simultaneously aware and unaware of having. At its least justified, Shakespeare’s witty scenes can manifest precisely their existence as a species of comic stand-up shtick,

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usually from a double act, whose significance for the action of the play may be foregrounded precisely in its marginality. Take, for example, Nerissa’s invitation to Portia in their first scene onstage to tell her ‘what warmth is there in your affection towards any of these princely suitors … ?’ (1.2.31–3) and Portia’s set-up of a response: ‘I pray thee over-name them and, as thou namest them, I will describe them’ (34–5). Sixty lines later, having gone through the whole list in considerable detail, Nerissa tells Portia (and us), ‘You need not fear, lady, the having any of these lords. They have acquainted me with their determinations, which is indeed to return to their home and to trouble you with no more suit’ (97–100). The whole sequence is a comic routine and exists solely for that purpose, as randomly aggregative and endless as Freud’s examples. Often misunderstood as a general rule, Freud’s analyses in The Psychopathology of Everday Life define ‘the facts cautiously enough if we say that while proper names are sometimes forgotten for simple reasons, they are also sometimes forgotten for reasons motivated by repression’ (11, Freud’s italics). Not all forgetting is therefore an act of repression. Determining which are and which are not is the analyst’s task. Each and every example of forgetting a proper name, a foreign word, a name or a sequence of words (to turn Freud’s chapter headings into a list) reveals for Freud, by the deliberate choice of narrative, moments at which it is worth remembering the fact of forgetting, since, under the lazzi, the scenarios he sets out, the individual’s control slips away and what is spoken or what cannot be spoken or spoken of is revealed. One example is when a young lady cannot remember the name of the novel about Christ because, as she comes to realize, to name Ben Hur would be to say something that ‘neither I nor any young girl would wish to employ, particularly in front of young men’: as Anthea Bell explains, the German word Hure, ‘whore’, lurks inside, for, as Freud goes further and argues that ‘she unconsciously equated uttering the title of Ben Hur out loud with offering sexual favours’, Ben Hur becomes ‘Ich bin Hure’, ‘I am a whore’ (43). While I find this example of forgetting as repression adequately convincing, others of Freud’s demonstrations of avoidance and repression are much less so. When, for instance, he seeks to demonstrate that a young man’s misquotation of a line from Virgil’s Aeneid is a result of the anxiety the young man feels about the possibility of his girlfriend’s pregnancy,17 I share Sebastiano

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Timpanaro’s doubts. As Timpanaro minutely and learnedly argues, in a chapter he titles ‘Pedestrian (but True) Explanation of an Incomplete Quotation’, the kinds of error the young man makes are entirely compatible with the extent – and limitations – of his knowledge of Latin, and that they are ordinary linguistic errors, not repressive ones.18 The early chapters of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life may be an account of people forgetting but they are also an account of Freud’s remembering their – and his own – forgetting. The stories, whether from his memory of himself or ones his patients tell him or that other practitioners pass on (making it sound like a tale-telling evening in the bar at a psychiatrists’ convention), are recalled, reshaped, redacted and then ready to become our corpus of remembered forgettings, some of which the reader of the book will remember but most of which the reader will soon forget. And within the process of the revealing of forgetting comes another form of remembering, for, in ‘the phenomenon of the temporary forgetting of names, … the person concerned does not merely forget, but also remembers incorrectly’ (5, italics in original). Attempting to recall what might be locked away through repression, we use other names, ‘substitute names’, that ‘are immediately recognized as incorrect’ but which ‘persist in forcing themselves upon [us]’ (5). But the substitutes may themselves produce a second order of displacement: If a name escapes us, and we seek other and closely connected names in order to retrieve it, these other names, sought as points of reference, quite often escape us too. Forgetfulness thus moves on from one name to another, as if to demonstrate the existence of an obstacle that cannot easily be removed. (43–4) They ‘demonstrate’ this to Freud, of course, not necessarily to the individual and not necessarily convincingly enough for Freud’s more sceptical readers. But, again, Freud’s explorations of the daily mistakes, of forgetting that is not forgetting but suppressing/ substituting/replacing, offers another powerful way of thinking about how forgetting figures for us.

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In many ways, the forgetting that Freud documents in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is untroubling. Elsewhere he tries to make sense of forms of forgetting that are stronger signals of the ‘return of the repressed’. As Adam Phillips sets out, at the start of his powerful and beautifully written consideration of ‘Freud and the Uses of Forgetting’, ‘People come for psychoanalytic treatment because they are remembering in a way that does not free them to forget’.19 Symptoms, he argues, are ‘mnemonics of desire’ and ‘desire, for Freud … is unforgettable’ (22). Those aspects of the unacceptable or unbearable that have been, for a temporary period which may be of radically different extents, ‘hidden away’ or which the patient has been ‘unable to process’ return so that ‘he’ – Phillips, for some reason, genders the patient as male – ‘is encouraged to remember that he has forgotten these things, that he has actively mislaid them’ (22). This knowing that one has mislaid something resonated with, for instance, Desdemona correcting her  misremembering in the willow song (see pp. 33–4) but frequently elsewhere in Shakespeare in that moment of awareness of what has been forgotten, as for instance in this exchange: hamlet I must to England – you know that. gertrude Alack, I had forgot; ’tis so concluded on. (3.4.198–9) The passive form of Gertrude’s last comment underlines her lack of involvement or agency in the decision. Admittedly, such matters in the scene as Hamlet’s killing Polonius and apparently seeing a ghost that Gertrude cannot see, at least with the rare exceptions of productions like John Barton’s (RSC, 1980) and Nicholas Hytner’s (National Theatre, 2010), might reasonably have affected Gertrude’s memory but it also functions as a pointer to some form of repression of her desire for him (whether sexualized or not). For Freud the analogy for this process lies in our earliest experience of ‘oral instinctual impulses’, our sense of whether something is edible. We have a choice: to eat or to taste and spit out – and that choice is for Phillips descriptive of two forms of forgetting:

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… is forgetting … more like eating something or like spitting it out? … if you spit something out you dispense with it once and for all; if you eat something you forget it through a process called digestion … The question becomes not: what do I want to forget and what do I want to remember? but: which form of forgetting do I want to use? (23) And spitting out creates the ‘paradoxical notion [of] an absolute forgetting: that which can be put beyond the reach of memory’ (23). For Freud, then, there is a forgetting which is a way of remembering through repression and a forgetting ‘that is its own negation, that leaves nothing to remember’. And Freud, for Phillips, is ‘in a continual dilemma as to which of these alternatives best represented the aims of psychoanalytic treatment … Was psychoanalysis exorcism or recycling? Can the past be forgotten, and then be tuned into something that doesn’t need forgetting?’ (24). So, in this crucial area of the processing of desire, for example through making it the material of the dream, desire is remembered ‘by being successfully forgotten’ in a space where desire can be accessible because it is made tolerable through the forms of forgetting that the processing has enabled. Memories, themselves always subject to being screens, falsified, distorted, are themselves not the opposite of forgetting but ‘forms of forgetting’. The cure is therefore a kind of remembering ‘that makes forgetting possible’. Forgetting is, following this line of argument, not just an attribute of humanity but almost a kind of essence of what it means to be human: ‘man is the animal driven to forget, and driven by forgetting’ (25). But it also becomes something intimately bound up with Freud’s concept of the Death Instinct, for ‘[the] only way to truly forget the past is to dispose of it, to kill it, and the only way one can do that with any assurance is by dying’ (38). More than any other exploration of Freud’s thinking in this area, Phillips’s brilliant account is deeply disturbing in its subordination of the concept of memory itself to forgetting. Much of the work I have been and will be considering is concerned with the ways in which memory and forgetting interrelate, intersect, engage with each other. They may be opposites, antonymically representing that division, or they may move from one to the other in either direction or only in one (as, for instance, I mention below as apparent in

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Heidegger’s thinking). Each may be embraced by the other or resist that containment, as in the concept that forgetting is the precondition of clearing space that makes the formation of memory possible, the precondition of the process of creating that which will later be able to be remembered. In the many different structures that have been offered, Phillips’s account of Freud makes forgetting necessarily triumphant since even memory is not an alternative to forgetting but a fact of forgetting and this transcendent state, the state which controls all our negotiations with the realities within which we breathe, is a desire for the death of which, like taxes, we are assured. How we might use that in terms of Shakespeare is wide open but one way would be to see the play itself as the desired object that is always already forgotten, even in the process of reading/seeing/ consuming it. Shakespeare plays are, then, somehow indigestible, leaving traces of themselves but only as marks of how much else is both forgotten and not yet available to be known and retained. And behind that might lie Shakespeare’s only thinking about a play as digestible, in the magnificently careless and carefree prologue to Troilus and Cressida;                 … our play Leaps o’er the vaunt and firstlings of those broils, Beginning in the middle, starting thence away To what may be digested in a play. (Prol., 26–9) As the audiences get their stomachfuls, they leave few traces of the play behind. Consumed and therefore lost, the play asks not to be forgotten because it is to be eaten again, the next time we see it, as we remember how much of it we have, in the interim, forgotten.

Not forgetting At the centre of Freud’s less apocalyptic discussion, throughout The Psychopathology of Everday Life, is the harmlessness of forgetting, even in the repressing mode he is fascinated by. The book’s stories are always without danger, always of mistakes that,

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at worst, provide a momentary frisson, perhaps awkwardness or embarrassment, across the calm of bourgeois life – even in the case of the woman who does not recognize a man as her own husband: ‘“Oh, look, there’s Herr L.” She had forgotten that Herr L. had actually been her husband for some weeks’ (xi). Forgetfulness is a boon of normality, against which hypermnesia, the state of being unable to forget anything, is terrifying. There are two especially familiar examples of this: the first fictional, the second factual. The first is Jorge Luis Borges’s story usually known as ‘Funes the Memorious’ but, in Andrew Hurley’s more recent version, retitled ‘Funes, His Memory’.20 While Funes remembers everything – and therefore renders the word ‘recall’, for the story’s narrator, ‘a sacred verb’ (131) – the narrative avoids the question of forgetting except at one crucial moment, as Borges explores Funes’s possible limitations consequent on the apparent infinity of his memory: I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars – and they were virtually immediate particulars. (137) As Amy Cook charts, people who have exceptional abilities in facial recognition, ‘super-recognizers’, can have problems following narratives in films and theatres. Their ability always to recognize and recall the actor’s face with certainty and precision may mean that the connection between face and identity is so strong that it holds up maybe too well, making it harder for them to perceive actors as disappearing into a new character … [T]he relationship between facial recognition and character tracking suggests that a certain amount of strategic forgetting facilitates the tracking of fictional characters on screen.21 This therefore places them in an intriguingly analogous position to those with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. Being able to recognize the difference between one person and another is useful in life and pivotal in theatre and film. As

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difficult as narratives can be to follow imagine what it would be like if you simply could not perceive any difference in the faces of Hamlet, Horatio, and Laertes.22 The activity of watching depends on our perceiving the separate identities and, indeed, seeing the same actor’s doubling of most roles as being a theatrical exigency rather than conveying meaning. My example in Chapter 2 of the double of Captain and priest in Twelfth Night (see p. 63) is of this type: there is no point to the double other than using an actor efficiently. By contrast, doubling, say, Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream creates a potential argument about the fairy figures as dream avatars of the humans. In the same way an entirely practicable and very powerful double of the Ghost and Claudius in Hamlet produces a double of two brothers and may cast into doubt what Hamlet suggests in the contrast of their portraits, the one he defines with ‘See what a grace was seated on this brow’, the other as ‘a mildewed ear’ (3.4.53, 62), or, earlier, describing the comparison of the two as ‘Hyperon to a satyr’, with Claudius ‘no more like my father / Than I to Hercules’ (1.2.140, 152–3), for the same body is both characters, both images. As playgoers we learn how to see the difference between one kind of doubling and the other, between the requirements of the size of a theatre company and a ‘speaking double’, as it has become known. Cook’s ‘strategic forgetting’ is a learned skill for watching almost all theatre; it is strikingly irrelevant to film where all doubles have point, as, for example, when Olivia de Haviland played both Terry Collins and her twin sister in The Dark Mirror (1946). Funes devotes his waking hours, forced by the excess of his memory into a kind of physical torpor, to an unending and unachievable attempt to classify his memories, to sort into some sort of order the intensity and complexity of each moment as it ramifies in his mind. Unenviable in its excess, this almost idealized perfection of the concept of memory itself is destructive of Funes’s life, of his ability simply to enjoy living, given that remembering each day takes another day to achieve, the torpor the price, along with the difficulty of the subtraction thought requires, of moving beyond the ultimately frustrating endlessness of the detail that his memory forces him to encode.

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The beauty of Borges’s fiction is paralleled by the moving account by A. R. Luria of the person he calls simply ‘S.’, actually named Sherashevsky, someone whose inexhaustible memory eventually defines his career path as a professional mnemonist. Luria devotes a section of his study to ‘the art of forgetting’.23 S. had, in his performances, to distinguish between charts of numbers written out in the same evening and he began to fear he would confuse them. Hence, for the first time, he had to develop a deliberate technique to forget each in turn, for, unlike, say, the number strings that Luria gave him and which S. might be asked to recite a decade or more later, the performance lists would not ever be returned to. They did not need to be remembered but they were being remembered and S. had to find a way of somehow not any longer remembering them, the exact reverse of the experience of the rest of humankind which works so hard to move towards a state of being even marginally confident in having remembered something that we decide warrants remembering. S.’s memory usually worked by creating action sequences, so that, for instance, a number string would be placed along a street he imagined himself walking down. S.’s first strategy for forgetting was similar: So in my mind I erase the blackboard and cover it, as it were, with a film that’s completely opaque and impenetrable. I take this off the board and listen to it crunch as I gather it into a ball. That is, after each performance is over, I erase the board, walk away from it, and mentally gather up the film I had used to cover the board … Even so, when the next performance starts and I walk over to that blackboard, the numbers I had erased are liable to turn up again. (69) S. had to develop more reliable techniques for forgetting. He thought of writing down what he no longer wished to remember, inverting the usual process in which, meaninglessly for S., we write things down in order to remember them: ‘I started doing this with small matters like phone numbers, last names, errands of one sort or another, But I got nowhere, for in my mind I continued to see what I’d written’ (70). He tried burning the slips of paper but ‘the

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“magical act of burning” he tried proved of no use to him. And after he had burned a piece of paper with some numbers he wanted to forget and discovered he could still see traces of the numbers on the charred embers, he was desperate’ (70). Tormented by the problem of forgetting, he suddenly found an effective solution, ‘though it remained as unfathomable to him as it did to [Luria]’ (71). Checking, on a multiple performance evening, whether the first chart of numbers was still ‘there’, he was afraid somehow that it wouldn’t be. I both did and didn’t want it to appear … And then I thought: the chart of numbers isn’t turning up now and it’s clear why – it’s because I don’t want it to! Aha! That means if I don’t want the chart to show up it won’t …. At that moment I felt I was free. (71–2)24 What S. was able to do – and what he is one of a minute group of people ever to have been able to do – is to will forgetting, to manage, consciously and deliberately, to choose to forget. He had to do what Hamlet wanted to do: (to quote the passage yet again) ‘from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records’ (1.5.98–9). Cicero, as Shakespeare probably knew, had described the need and the usual failure: Themistocles at all events, when Simonides or someone offered to teach him the art of memory, replied that he would prefer the art of forgetting; ‘for I remember,’ said he, ‘even things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things I wish to forget.’25 Simonides, in some narratives the originator of the art of memory, presumably cannot help Themistocles. Choosing to forget, willing forgetting is beyond his science. For Themistocles, forgetting is not a negative but a positive, something that enables memory, clearing space (of the kind that S. does not need) where more memory can be stored. The image of limited space is the subject of an early conversation between Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in A Study in Scarlet (1887) when Watson is astonished to discover that Holmes does not know ‘the composition of the Solar System’. Holmes replies:

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Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it … I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilled workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.26 Holmesian scholarship suggests that Holmes’s ignorance of Copernican theory is feigned and ‘leg-pulling on Holmes’ part’.27 More significantly, Baring-Gould’s annotation on Holmes’s comment on ‘useless facts elbowing out useful ones’ points out that ‘Holmes did not live up to his preaching here. He later extols “the oblique uses of knowledge” for their good results (The Valley of Fear), and of such knowledge he had more than the average stock, as he himself tells us in “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane”’ (1:155). In other words, even someone as careful with his memory as Holmes learns, implicitly at least, that the lumber in the attic might be useful, that he does not fully know what might prove to be necessary and that he does not fully control what is remembered, let alone whether he can opt to forget. Indeed, in ‘The Greek Interpreter’, he discusses ‘the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic’, showing that he still knows Copernican theory and has not managed to forget it (1:155). In a fine article on Holmes as ‘the literary character most commonly associated with autism in the popular imagination’, Sonya Freeman Loftis argues that he epitomizes one particular autism stereotype: Holmes also perfectly fits the stereotype of the autistic savant so pervasive in popular culture, as he has an incredibly detailoriented mind combined with phenomenal memory skills.

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As public awareness of autism spectrum disorders increase, stereotypes abound: the media often represents people with autism as computers, machines, or aliens and has spread the erroneous stereotype that all autistic people are savants.28 Holmes’s memory skills are therefore a sign in and of themselves of his ‘disability’, his difference from the norms of human behaviour, and his appearance as more machine than individual. His dataretrieval systems, such as the volumes of newspaper cuttings arranged by topics, are in themselves strikingly anticipatory of computer systems for data storage. They are volumes of memory that, even in the chaos of his rooms at 221B Baker Street, are always immediately and effectively able to be accessed by Holmes or, under his instructions, even by Watson. Holmes does not know what might turn out to be useful and, both in his mind and in the data in the rooms, he has found ways of ensuring that what becomes useful is available. Even Holmes cannot be sure what ought to be forgotten. The possibility of choosing to forget has proven to be a desire long after Themistocles and Cicero. John Willis, of whom more later, in his Mnemonica (1618), argued for its viability, proposing that what he terms ‘deposition or putting things out of mind’29 is an activity that can indeed be undertaken and one route to it is, Willis suggests, by writing something down, strikingly like S.’s attempt. It did not work for the latter and it seems unlikely it would work for normal, non-hypermnesiac individuals either. In Book Two of his study, Willis wonders whether ‘there be any Art of Oblivion (as some affirm)’.30 Willis is cautious here about an ars oblivionalis.31 Umberto Eco was absolutely (and wittily) sure such a thing could not exist.32 Eco’s discussion derives from fine research in early modern European manuals for memory techniques but his crucial argument is that he cannot accept that there could be such a thing as ‘the principles of a technique and of a rhetorical art – and therefore principles of a process that was artificial and institutable at will – that would permit one to forget in a matter of seconds what one knew’ (254). Since early recommendations for memory often depended on associating a factual element with an image, Eco wonders ‘how revoking the same monstrous image could cancel, repress, abolish the notion previously associated with it’: ‘I do not see how one can imagine an object x that, duly evoked, acts in some way on the cerebral center to cancel object y’ (254).

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In his playful imagining of nonexistent academic departments he consigns an ars oblivionalis to a ‘Department of Adynata because it cannot be realized’ (he defines this as a department of ‘sciences that were historically impossible’, 254) or to the ‘Department of Oxyomoronica’ if it is understood to be ‘a semiotica oblivionalis … because a semiotics is by definition a device that stalls natural processes of oblivion’ (260). Of course, S.’s experience shows that Eco is wrong and Willis’s caution unwarranted: there can be a technique for forgetting but only in the quite exceptional case of someone like S., for whom the normal processes of remembering and of forgetting simply do not apply. The ars oblivionalis can be moved out of the Department of Adynata but only because of its viability as a process for a tiny number of remarkable individuals. Nonetheless, the forms of active forgetting are frequently seen as desirable and practicable – and not only in the ways that some of Paul Connerton’s categories (e.g. ‘Prescriptive Forgetting’) operate. Again and again, not only in Hamlet, Shakespeare offers characters who think they can choose to forget. But it is also often the case that forgetting is argued to be necessary to the constitution of the individual. For Nietzsche, indeed, in an essay published in 1874, it is specifically defined as a precondition, a necessity for happiness: ‘it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink down on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past … will never know what happiness is.’33 Nietzsche perceives the limitation of being unable to forget (being Funes or S., as it were) not, as Borges does, in an inability to think abstractly nor, as Luria does, in a social constriction, but in the impossibility of action, something akin perhaps to Funes’s torpor: Imagine the extremest possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forgetfulness at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of becoming … Forgetting is essential to action of any kind … A man who wanted to feel historically through and through would

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be like … an animal that had to live only by rumination and ever repeated rumination. Thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting. (60) Forgetting is, in this sense, the enabling of the balance to the possibility of remembering within an awareness of history but without, for Nietzsche, being always and only trapped within historical awareness. Repeatedly, forgetting is seen as the crucial part of the awareness of history, individual and collective. So, to forget, as Eugène Minkowski argued in 1933, is necessary because the ‘mass of the forgotten’ … is our ‘first intuition of the past’ and therefore ‘constitute[s] the essential basic material upon which memory comes to embroider the remembrances of isolated events’: ‘forgetting is thus not simply memory failure; it appears to us now in its positive value’. Minkowski wants to separate forgetting from ‘having a good or bad memory’; instead, forgetting ‘marks out this obscure mass behind us which gives us’ that first intuition of the past. Hence, ‘the vision that everything is destined to be forgotten seems much more natural, much more appeasing, than the fact that it can be reproduced again as an isolated event’.34 Again, a parallel with Shakespeare is easy and significant, for in the English history cycles, in particular, characters remember and forget the pasts that define the present, recalling only in order to define connection and deviation, remembering only to remind themselves, others and us of what seems to have been forgotten. So, in Richard III, characters, caught in Richard’s web of death, recall Margaret’s prophecies as a way of making a connection and reminding themselves that they ought to have remembered them and acted on them earlier. Grey reminds Rivers and Vaughan, as they head to death, ‘Now Margaret’s curse is fall’n upon our heads’ (3.3.14), and Hastings, in the very next scene, invokes her: ‘O, Margaret, Margaret, now thy heavy curse / Has lighted on poor Hastings’ wretched head’ (3.4.91–2). Buckingham too produces a repetition as he heads to his execution: ‘Thus Margaret’s curse falls heavy on my neck.’ (5.1.25). Only Queen Elizabeth invokes this curse before it is too late, making it not forgotten, when she tells Dorset to escape ‘And live with Richmond … / Lest thou increase

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the number of the dead / And make me die the thrall of Margaret’s curse’ (4.1.42–5). This argument for the awareness of forgetting as a precondition of remembering is of crucial importance to Heidegger, as he defines the kind of forgetting that occurs when Dasein, for him the central tenet of how to be in the world, ‘has forgotten itself in its ownmost thrown potentiality-for-Being’: This forgetting is not nothing, nor is it just a failure to remember; it is rather a ‘positive’ ecstatical mode of one’s having been – a mode with a character of its own … Only on the basis of such forgetting can anything be retained … by the concernful makingpresent which awaits … [r]emembering is possible only on [the basis] of forgetting, and not vice versa.35 Being and Time is, from its opening words, concerned with forgetting: ‘This question has today been forgotten.’ (2). It is most apparent in Heidegger’s investigation of ‘the forgottenness of Being’. For Heidegger, as Stéphane Symons deftly explores, ‘memory is not a mere antithesis of the process of forgetting’.36 Exactly how that movement from forgetting to remembering is more usually defined I defer to later in this chapter.

Remembering and forgetting The complex interaction between memory and forgetfulness, across the wide range of materials I have been describing, can, in some respects, best be seen in the developing attitudes to forgetting in classical Greek culture, thence sometimes available to Shakespeare when mediated through Rome.37 It is there, for instance, as early as Hesiod’s Theogony (c. 700 bce). Hesiod identifies the Muses as the children of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, and defines their purpose as being ‘forgetfulness of evils and relief from anxieties’.38 Memory, personified as Mnemosyne, is the parent of forgetfulness. The word for forgetfulness, lesmosyne, here defines a quality, not a divinity. The ability to forget pain and suffering is explicitly connected by Hesiod to the healing, therapeutic work of the arts:

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Even if someone who has unhappiness in his newly anguished spirit is parched in his heart with grieving, yet when a poet, servant of the Muses, sings of the glorious deeds of people of old and the blessed gods who possess Olympus, he forgets his sorrows at once and does not remember his anguish at all … (ll.98–103) This is the benign version of forgetting. As Lewis Hyde puts it, ‘What drops into oblivion … is the fatigue, wretchedness, and anxiety of the present moment, its unrefined particularity.’39 Hesiod’s word choice, lesmosyne, comes from the same root as lethe. Karl Kerenyi, in his musing on the twinning of memory and forgetfulness, mnemosyne and lesmosyne, asks ‘what for the Greeks was Lethe, which we so facilely translate with “forgetting”?’ His answer is that [t]he Greek word and its entire family originally mean ‘being hidden’, ‘to hide oneself’, and ‘not noticing that which is hidden’. Such are the dead in their ‘hiddenness’; and this ‘being hidden’ is the ‘fields’ or the ‘house’ of Lethe.40 The root for forget is the Germanic *getan, meaning to hold, with for- as a prefix negating that, so that forgetting is letting go, dropping something that is held as a memory into the state of being forgotten (see p. 46). The Greek root for lethe, the verb letho (λήθω), is indeed hiding but what is most intriguing is its negative, for a-lethe produces the state of aletheia, the Greek word for truth, which becomes the thing that is taken out of hiding, that is revealed. The mind cannot make available what is hidden, only that which has been uncovered or disclosed. Aletheia was, according to Pindar’s Olympian Odes (10.4), a daughter of Zeus, a goddess in her own right. For Heidegger, aletheia is conceived of precisely in its pre-Socratic form and with a full awareness of its etymology, not as truth (or, more accurately, not yet as truth) but as ‘disclosure’, as the way in which the ontological world is made intelligible through being disclosed. Truth is precisely ‘unconcealedness’.41 In Hesiod, among the children of Nyx (Night), there is Eris (Strife, Discord), and it is Eris whose children include ‘painful Toil and Forgetfulness and Hunger and tearful Pains, and Combats and Battles and Murders and Slaughters, and Strifes and Lies and Tales

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and Disputes, and Lawlessness and Recklessness’ (ll.226–30). Here Forgetfulness is ‘Lethe’, the word which underpins the verb ‘forgets’ at l.103 (see above), and it is plain, from the company she keeps, that there is nothing benign about it. In Orphic poetry, the river is something to be avoided: You will find on the right in Hades’ halls a spring, and by it stands a ghostly cypress-tree, where the dead souls descending wash away their lives. Do not even draw nigh this spring. Further on you will find chill water flowing from the pool of memory … Say … ‘I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of memory.’ … After that you will rule amongst the other heroes.42 Over time but not early, Lethe becomes most often identified as the name for one of the rivers of Hades. The result is that, at the end of Plato’s Republic, he describes how ‘they all journeyed to the Plain of Oblivion, through a terrible and stifling heat, for it was bare of trees and all plants, and there they camped at eventide by the River of Forgetfulness, whose waters no vessel can contain. They were all required to drink a measure of the water … each one as he drank forgot all things.’43 Here it is the Plain of Oblivion that is Lethe, while the river’s name is ‘Ameles’, ‘Without Care’. In Roman poetry, Lethe is always a river, as in Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 6: when Aeneas in the underworld sees people gathered round the river of Lethe, he is told by Anchises that they are spirits and ‘at the water of Lethe’s stream they drink the soothing draught and long forgetfulness’.44 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 11, Iris is sent to the cave of sleep, whose silence is extensively described, ending ‘There mute silence dwells. But from the bottom of the cave there flows the stream of Lethe, whose waves, gently murmuring over the gravelly bed, invite to slumber.’45 Drinking the waters of the river Lethe, whether or not it includes passing over the Plain of Oblivion, is therapeutic, not catastrophic. As Kerenyi puts it, ‘It is a drink and a stream at the same time characteristically directed towards disappearance and forgottenness.’46 He traces its survival in ‘later mortuary epigrams’ where ‘its meaning has paled into a languid conception of the peace-giving waters of death … [as] a narcotizing drink’.47 Separating from the cares of worldly existence, the pain and troubles of lived experience, helps the individual pass over into

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the afterlife carefree, peaceful, pleasurably without memory rather than, as for us, seeing forgetfulness as a troubling disturbance of what it means to be human. What for the Greeks and Romans was desirable in moving away from life can more often for us be a terrifying threat within life. But Lethe is, at times in the classical materials, also conceptualized as a divinity, like the one addressed by Orestes as he awakes in Euripides’ Orestes: ‘O lady Oblivion-of-woes, what a wise goddess you are, and how often those in misfortune invoke you!’48 Indeed, as Connerton points out, in his category ‘Prescriptive Forgetting’, Perhaps more remarkable still is the fact that the Athenians erected on the acropolis, in their most important temple, an altar dedicated to Lethe, that is, to forgetting. The installation of this altar meant that the injunction to forget, and the eradication of civil conflict that this was thought to engender, was seen as the very foundation of the life of the polis.49 The altar is mentioned by Plutarch as having been erected in a temple dedicated to Poseidon and Athena, a mark of their dispute which Poseidon lost. The altar marks their amnesty, a memorial to forgetting, and ‘lest the amnesty drift into amnesia, one day of the month Boedromion was subtracted each year as an anniversary to remember that the gods had forgotten their quarrel’.50 Like other amnesties, it was a form of oath, mē mnēsikakein, ‘to swear “not to remember the evils”’.51 So, as Hyde suggests, ‘the erased date and the altar to Forgetfulness are reminders that the foundational divine discord should be left to the past, not brought forward’.52 The dispute between two gods becomes encoded as a social and civic act of a ritual of accepting forgetting – and adjusting the calendar in the process. Plutarch compares Poseidon’s willingness to agree to this act of oblivion in defeat with that of Thrasybulus who agreed with such an amnesty when victorious.53 Thrasybulus was the leader of the Athenian democratic revolt against the tyrannical rule of The Thirty, resulting in the amnesty of 403 bce, what Nicole Loraux calls ‘the memorable forgetting’ in her superb study of Athenian cultures of political memory and forgetting.54 From the person moving carefree towards the afterlife to the divinity of forgetting that defines the ending of moments of civic revolt, Athens codified forgetting in the broadest range of individual and social activity.

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Early modern forgetting Throughout the book so far I have frequently touched on examples of early modern writing far outside Shakespeare, examples that are engaged with aspects of thinking about forgetting, oblivion, amnesty and other terms that fall within the full breadth of the individual and social constructions of the absences that forgetting includes. This section will add in more of that evidence and enlarge on some of the topics already briefly mentioned. It sets out a range of early modern thinking – literary, theological, pedagogical and other disciplines too – to suggest contexts within which Shakespeare wrote, his audiences watched and his readers encountered his ways of exploring forgetting. It is striking, for instance, that, in the early modern period, amnesty is such a new word for the political acts of reconciliation consequent on conflict. In early modern dictionaries it is still visibly a Latin word, appearing as amnestia, not amnesty, and defined simply as ‘forgetfulness of things past’, for example in Sir Thomas Elyot’s 1538 dictionary.55 EarlyPrint offers no example of the English form of the word before Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1608), which is also OED’s first citation. John Willis’s term for the active forgetting he believed to be possible was ‘deposition’. As he puts it, Deposition is, whereby things before committed to memory, are called to minde againe, and either committed to writing, or otherwise dispatched, that so it may be put out of our mind: and the memorial places after such deposition of the Idea’s being left emptie, may be the fitter to receive new Idea’s into them. This deposition or putting things out of mind, must be undertaken as soone as conveniently we can; that the minde may not be charged with the burthen of them longer then needs must …56 In his discussion of the topic in Book Two, Willis argues for the necessity of this process: At all times when a man is about to commit any thing in custody to his Memory, first let him study to drown all unnecessary thoughts in oblivion, that he may perfectly intend the things he is to learn; Oblivion being such a principle of Memory, as

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Privation is of Generation … Deposition, or discharging things committed to mind, is not unlike expunging writing out of TableBooks: If therefore there be any Art of Oblivion (as some affirm) it may be properly referred hither.57 Again, as with amnesty, deposition is not a common word, at least in this sense. Most often it is used in the legal sense of witness testimony, and this, together with the less common usage for deposing someone in authority, removing them from office, is the standard definition in early modern dictionaries. These are the OED’s senses 5.a and 4; it offers as 2 ‘The action of laying down, laying aside, or putting away’, which seems closest to Willis’s usage. The OED points, too, to the tight interconnection between oblivion and drinking the waters of Lethe: ‘1.a The state or fact of forgetting or having forgotten; forgetfulness; (also) freedom from care or worry. Frequently used with reference to the River Lethe in Greek Mythology, which was supposed to produce a state of forgetfulness in those who drank from its waters.’ There is in this a kind of balance between a negative and a positive: a negative of forgetting something that might need to have been remembered but also the positive of being free of care and worry. Hence, for instance, OED can cite Piero in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1602) wanting Lethe and oblivion, ‘Make us drinke Lethe by your queint conceipts; / That for two daies, oblivion smother griefe’,58 but earlier in the play Piero has summoned up oblivion on his enemy: ‘Obliuion choake the passage of thy fame.’59 OED’s second sense (1.b) is unequivocally negative: ‘Forgetfulness resulting from inattention or carelessness; heedlessness, disregard.’ And so is the next: ‘2.a The state or condition of being forgotten; (also, more generally) obscurity, nothingness, void, death.’ The first sense allows oblivion to be modified by an adjective like sweet, for example, in Marston’s Sophonisba (London, 1606) where Syphax, inveighing against ‘Reputation’, argues that ‘Wert not for thy affliction all might sleepe / In sweete oblivion’ (sig. A4r). Shakespeare offers a similar sense for oblivious when Macbeth asks the doctor for ‘some sweet oblivious antidote’ that could ‘Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart’ (5.3.43–5).60 When it is linked to ‘obscurity, nothingness, void, death’, its modifiers are radically different: Buckingham, in Richard III, encourages Richard

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to take the crown because otherwise England will stay to be ‘almost shouldered in the swallowing gulf / Of dark forgetfulness and deep oblivion’ (3.7.127–8). Some of those negative overtones can be dominant. Jaques defines the seventh age of man as ‘second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’ (As You Like It, 2.7.166–7), mere here indicating its absolute, undiluted quality. It is both a return to the first age and an anticipation of what comes next. Richard Day imaged that next stage in a plate in his A Book of Christian Prayers (1608), showing Memory, personified as a recorder, ‘with her pen and book’ as one of the ‘twenty-two allegorical virtues triumphing over their correspondent vices’.61 The image is a kind of sidebar in a complexly designed page (sig. 2G4r), with, above the figure, the motto ‘Memorie is a treasure house’, while, below it, comes the equally bald statement ‘Oblivion is as a grave’, for at Memory’s feet is a grave with a shrouded corpse and, beneath that, the work implements of the gravedigger, spade and pickaxe.62 The title page of Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World (1614) shows the figure of History, as the ‘Magistra vitae’, the teacher of life as Cicero dubbed her, another incarnation of Clio as the Muse of History, supporting the globe. At her feet lie a skeleton, marked as ‘Mors’, Death, and a human identified as ‘Oblivio’. As Garrett Sullivan perceptively argues, this Oblivion is neither dead, given his listless posture, nor asleep, for his eyes are open. He is, instead, ‘overtaken … with lethargy’.63 Sullivan quotes from Pierre de la Primaudaye in The Second Part of the French Academy (1605): ‘And the disease called the Lethargie bringeth with it forgetfulnesse and want of memorie’.64 The poem opposite Ralegh’s title page, perhaps by Ben Jonson, shows why the two figures are conjoined: ‘From Death and darke Oblivion (neere the same)’.65 As Sullivan argues, oblivion here ‘represents a broadly historical forgetfulness, one aligned with death and in opposition to history’ (27). As history is forgotten in this listless state, the individual is placed in a disjunction from social activity, isolated in so many ways. Lethargy is, of course, connected to Lethe. As such, it is no surprise that, as John Bullokar puts it in An English Expositor (1616), it is a disease that makes the patient ‘forgetfull, with losse (in a manner) of reason’.66 Sullivan’s superb exploration of the early modern physiology of forgetting and lethargy expands further on the kinds of sources I have just summarized, closely following in

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his footsteps. As he sums it up, ‘[l]ethargy and forgetfulness serve a fantasy of a recalcitrant and unresponsive body, a body from which the will’s purposive control has been completely evacuated’ (31). From lethargic forgetting to the lassitude of the figure of Oblivion in Ralegh is a short step. In Shakespeare lethargy is the word Iago uses to characterize Othello’s state after the epileptic fit, ‘The lethargy must have his quiet course’ (4.1.53). Autolycus’s song at the sheep-shearing in The Winter’s Tale reduces the hearers to a ‘time of lethargy’, when they have ‘No hearing, no feeling but my sir’s song, and admiring the nothing of it’ and he can easily pick all their pockets (4.4.615–17). Falstaff calls the King’s apoplexy ‘a kind of lethargy’ and glosses it as ‘a kind of sleeping in the blood’ (2 Henry IV, 1.2.109–11). Most inventively of all, it is one of the many words that a Volscian uses to describe peace, ‘a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible, a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men’ (4.5.228–30). Sir Toby Belch, perhaps deliberately, mishears Olivia’s question ‘how have you come so early by this lethargy?’: ‘Lechery? I defy lechery.’ (1.5.120–2). Lechery and lethargy seem especially distinctly opposed in the gap between the former’s activity and the latter’s torpor and passivity. In early modern thinking, as in the examples with which this chapter opened, forgetting is largely forgotten. As Sullivan puts it, it is ‘overlooked even as it defines the terms of memory’s representation’ (27). But there are striking interconnections of forgetting with Christian thinking. On the one hand, as Sullivan argues, forgetfulness and sleep are a temptation to sinners to stay unaware of their sins. He quotes from Benjamin Austin, in The Presumptuous Mans Mirror (1641), with its wonderful subtitle, ‘A Watch-bell to rouze up a secure sinner out of his sleep of security’, warning Wherefore art thou sick of that spirituall Lethergy of sinne, thou must take the Physitians counsel to them which are sick of a drowsy Lethargy, to have a bell rung in their eares, that they may be kept from sleeping … thou must have the word of God ever sounding in the eares … (sig. C4r)67 There is a connection here, and Sullivan makes it, with the spiritual wake-up call needed for those who go to the theatre (see p. 68).

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In the early modern world of spiritual forgetting, there is, however, a frequent suggestion of forgetting as a positive, an advantage in the movement of sinful humanity towards the right perspective on the self and on the beyond. So, for instance, Thomas Playfere, in the sermon published as The Pathway to Perfection, urges his hearers/ readers to forget their good deeds, because, as Engel and his coeditors gloss it, ‘it is a vain activity to focus upon what one has already accomplished’.68 Playfere explores a number of kinds of good forgetting. The first is in abandoning one’s former life in order to follow Christ: ‘Sell all that thou hast … Or if no man will take it, forget it.’69 He draws a sharp distinction between classical (i.e. pagan) philosophy and Christianity: … the first lesson that Socrates taught his Scholar was ‘remember’ … But the first lesson that Christ teaches his scholar is ‘forget’ …. Forget thine own country and thy father’s house. So that faith is that fair Helena, which drinketh to us in a cup of nepenthes … And the water of the word of God is that fountain Lethe, which when we come to drink of it, it speaks to us, as it were, in this sort: remember not the former things, neither regard the things of old. (240) Playfere moves on to go through a number of Christ’s miracles, calling on those he healed to forget their previous experiences, ending with the example of Mary Magdalene: ‘yet being delivered, renounce the devil and all his works and forget all the wicked works which are behind thee. Yea, and all thy good works also. For if thou forget them, then will God remember them’ (241). So divine remembering is a consequence premised precisely on human forgetting: God will remember good works because we have forgotten them. In a less foregroundedly theological way, Sir Miles Sandys, in Prudence (1634), writes of oblivion as being, as Pope Gregory described it, quaedam mors [a kind of death], yet in some things to be approved of. First, the oblivion of injuries. Secondly, the forgetting a good turn done to another. Thirdly, the not remembering of delights in former sins. And last of all, the non-recordation of temporal things.70

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And Sandys links this to the tale of Themistocles wanting an art of forgetting (see p. 93), because ‘he could not forget those things that were requisite to be buried in oblivion’ (134). As Henry Peacham warned, in The Garden of Eloquence (1593), even as he was advocating for the virtues of anamnesis, [t]he chiefest respect of this caution is that evil matters be not remembered as to call into remembrance offence forgiven and long forgotten, or occasions which may renew unprofitable sorrow or move anger of actions of vanity which were better to lie buried than to be revived.71 Throughout this chapter I have in part been concerned to chart the activity of forgetting, whether one can make forgetting active. In the early modern period, the energy that verb forms conferred could be found in the word oblivionize, not exactly a common word but here it is used by Emulo, a fool and a gallant noted for ‘the gallimaufrie of [his] language’ in Patient Grissill, a play by Dekker and others (1603): ‘though to my disconsolation, I will obliuionize my loue to the welch widdowe, and doe heere proclaime my delinquishment’ (sigs. C2r–v). ‘Oblivionize’ can be an equally extravagant word, even when strongly placed in the language of Christian lament. In Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem (1593), Thomas Nashe writes largely in the voice of Christ, complaining of human sinfulness in Jerusalem, before turning to a lengthy invective against the wickedness of contemporary London. The pamphlet is indeed, as Stanley Wells has said, ‘one of the most extraordinary pieces of prose in the language. Some think it also one of the worst; but they have to admit that if it is bad it is so in a thoroughly positive way’.72 At one point Nashe’s Christ speaks directly to Death: ‘Death …, when thou killest me, kill her [sc. Jerusalem’s] iniquities also: let thy deepe-entring Darte oblivionize their memories’ (fo. 23r). An extravagant gallant on abandoning his mistress and Christ calling on Death: oblivionize is an unusual word that can encompass such extremes. It can stand as an example of the inventiveness of the discourse registers for early modern consideration of forgetting, the verbal and cultural milieu within which Shakespeare’s explorations of the theory and practice of forgetting takes place, the explorations to which I now return.

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4 Forgetting, Genre and Gender

Near the start of a consideration of what countable items in early modern texts might reveal, Mike Witmore and Jonathan Hope demonstrate that ‘[y]ou can learn things about texts by counting pretty simple things, although the things you learn tend to be quite simple in themselves’.1 Though they do not use the example, I am reminded of Jedediah Buxton (1707–72), a farm labourer who never learned to write but who became briefly famous for his prodigious abilities in mental arithmetic and his fascination with counting – he is often regarded as an autistic savant. When he visited London in 1754, he was carried to see King Richard III, performed at Drury Lane playhouse, and it was expected either that the novelty and the splendor of the show would have fixed him in astonishment, or kept his imagination in a continual hurry; or that his passions would, in some degree have been touched by the power of action, if he had not perfectly understood the dialogue; but Jedediah’s mind was employed in the playhouse just as it was employed at church. During the dance he fixed his attention upon the number of steps; he declared after a fine piece of music, that the innumerable sounds produced by the instruments had perplexed him beyond measure, and he attended even to Mr Garrick only to count the words that he uttered, in which, he says, he perfectly succeeded.2 Hope and Witmore’s first example is to count the frequency in Shakespeare’s plays of the word king and they find something

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that was as obvious to them before the count as it was afterwards, something ‘impressive, if predictable’: that all the history plays go to the top of the resulting list with only one ‘non-history’ among them, King Lear, which, as they remind the reader, is called a history on the title page of Q1. Their next example arranges the plays in the order of frequency of occurrence of the word love and ‘[t]he comedies now come to the top, with an extra added tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, hardly a surprise’ (20). But there are also ‘a couple of “interesting” results’: Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure are very low and the four late plays often dubbed ‘Romances’ are even lower. The former pair, again, is probably not surprising but the latter four might be, given that one of these plays’ ‘typifying features is supposed to be the redemption of parents through the love of lost and rediscovered children’ (22). Significantly, what the computer count has done is to demonstrate absences: humans ‘are not very good at spotting things that aren’t there’. Their third and last count is the word might and this time the results are full of surprising and interesting positions: ‘the late plays all come to the top’, a result which ‘makes us want to investigate hypothetical and speculative language across Shakespeare’s career’ (24), after which the authors go off into ever more elaborate searches that the digital study of Shakespeare’s language might make possible. Witmore and Hope’s first two pieces of counting, a piece of academic fun to open up towards a larger and more substantive point, might warrant a little further thought. As they are well aware, even something as simple as counting king in Shakespeare’s plays raises questions about what is meant by ‘Shakespeare’s plays’, whether, for instance, that includes, say, Pericles or Sir Thomas More, and whether the count includes only the noun king or also the verb and whether it includes kings and king’s. But the concept of king is itself comparatively straightforward: the meaning of the word is simple, even if the occurrences vary, so that Romeo and Juliet and Othello are low in the list, though tragedies, because Verona is ruled by a Prince and Venice by a Duke, while the highest comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost and All’s Well, have kings as characters. While king is conceptually narrow, love is far more complex. When Witmore and Hope query the placing of the late plays in the love list, they are implicitly assuming that the love of parents for

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children is expressed through the word love, an assumption that may or may not be true, whereas the love of couples, same-sex or heterosexual, is certainly expressed through the word – hence the 195 occurrences of love (not to mention the additional use of loves and other forms) in the Sonnets. And what the word love means in each and every one of those occurrences shifts subtly and complexly as part of the prolonged and intense interrogation of the word that the entire sequence of Sonnets is conducting. Counting the word does not explain what the word means locally or globally nor even how complex a word it is: to count something else entirely, king and love are both four-letter nouns but counting the occurrences of four-letter nouns in Shakespeare is unlikely to be productive. Witmore and Hope sort their tables with an awareness of genre as a primary feature of each play, with ‘Genre’ being the only column apart from title and with a group of four genres acting as definers. Though the texts they are using are the Folger Digital Texts (https:// www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/), those texts do not mark genre, at least so far as I can see. The use of a genre ‘Late’ beyond the three genres of the First Folio, Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, changes the kinds of meanings the tables generate, as in the shifting position of the late plays they mention and I repeat above. ‘Late’ becomes a visible grouping, where, say, ‘Early’ is not – and, confusingly, they categorize Henry VIII as a ‘History’, not as ‘Late’. Whatever those who created the triple division of F1 thought they were doing, each play landed moderately firmly in a single place, with ‘History’ the clearest, narrowly defined as the reigns of English (but not British) kings. My purpose in this chapter is to consider forgetting, especially the words Shakespeare uses for forgetting, in a number of plays, in part in relation to genre and cross-referenced against issues of gender, using word-frequency as an initial, blunt tool to open up the topic. I shall be wondering whether forgetting in comedy is different from forgetting in tragedy. I have deliberately chosen to marginalize the genre of History play. There are two strong reasons for that decision. The first is, quite simply, that the work of Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann has already made substantial and exciting inroads into that investigation.3 I offer as a site for a certain anxiety their construction of the genre in precisely the ways that F1 did: as coterminous with English history. Genre is fluid and the

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divisions that John Heminges and Henry Condell (or whoever else was responsible for the tripartite division of the volume) arrived at redefine plays that, in their earlier printings, had been given other genres. To take two examples of the move from tragedy to history, what F1 calls ‘The Life & death of Richard the second’ was published in 1597 as The Tragedie of King Richard the second, while Richard III made exactly the same switch between its 1597 quarto and F1. The phrase ‘Life and death of’ is also used for Julius Caesar, making it look like a Roman history placed among the tragedies, while Macbeth is explicitly ‘The Tragedy of’, though it is Scottish history. On the other hand, the True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters (Q1, 1608) becomes ‘The Tragedie of King Lear’, while The Historie of Troylus and Cressida (Q1, 1609) squeaked in to F1 at the last moment as ‘The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida’. Hamlet, predictably, combined both, as if in echo of Polonius on genre, with Q1 (1603) and Q2 (1604) being The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. The second is that the semantic space occupied by forgetting in both Baldo and Karremann is bound up with their exploration of the cultural and historical senses in which communities, societies and nations, as well as the individuals who make them up, perform acts of cultural memory and cultural forgetting in the ways in which they construct their histories (including their histories of memory/ memories of histories and history of forgettings/forgettings of histories). As Baldo puts it, in introducing his study of 2 Henry IV, in a chapter whose title borrows from the play the phrase ‘washed in Lethe’ (5.2.71): More than any other history play by Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV explores the element of forgetting in plays ostensibly designed to help their audiences remember their common past: their historical abbreviations and omissions, their impersonations leading to self-forgetfulness, and the powerful nostalgias they are capable of generating.4 That seems to me – and I believe to Baldo too – a particular task of the English histories, where, to quote a subheading Baldo uses, forgetting can function ‘as rebellion within the kingdom of memory’ (62). Hence, his sustained interest in Frank Ankersmit’s typology of four kinds of historical forgetting in his Sublime Historical

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Experience,5 most particularly the fourth which commands most of both Ankersmit’s and Baldo’s attention, the forgetting consequent on ‘the most decisive and profound changes that Western man has undergone in the course of history … [when] he [sic] entered a wholly new world and, above all, he could do so only on the condition of forgetting a previous world and of shedding a former identity’.6 In a similar way, Karremann sets out her concerns with ‘a semiotics of forgetting’ as based on ‘the insight that remembering and forgetting are complementary forces rather than mutually exclusive opposites … [they] are integral aspects of the process through which cultural memory is formed and transformed’.7 That necessitates her distinguishing firmly – more firmly than I find myself able to do – between ‘individual forgetfulness and collective forgetting’, with the latter able to be ‘deliberate, purposeful and regulated’.8 Hence the importance for her study of John Frow’s definition of the role of forgetting in the endless process of reconstructing the past, where forgetting ‘is an integral principle of this model, since the activity of compulsive interpretation that organizes it involves at once selection and rejection’.9 For Karremann, the very term ‘forgetting’ situates projects like mine firmly in the field of memory studies: to explore the forms and functions of forgetting is an important contribution to our thinking about how cultural memory works, not a detraction or exception from it. (11) The entirely justifiable particularity of Baldo’s and Karremann’s concerns, justifiable precisely because of the limits of the genre within Shakespeare’s work that they are exploring, separates the form out firmly as a strategic choice for their analysis. For my work, then, I can take their understanding of this particular genre’s concerns with forgetting as a kind of given and turn my attention principally – though not exclusively – to comedy and tragedy. Before turning to my two genres, I offer some statistics. Using a base of some 224 uses by Shakespeare of the words dependent on forget (e.g. including forgetfulness, forgets, forgotten, etc.), my count shows 13 in the poems, 76 in seventeen plays that are comedies (average per play 4.47), 60 in ten histories (6 per play), and 75 in eleven tragedies (6.81 per play).10 The differences may

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be statistically significant, though they change somewhat when calculated as the rate per thousand lines rather than per play, especially given the tendency of the tragedies to be longer. In the list of plays by number of lines, the only comedies to appear in the top fifteen are Cymbeline (#3) and The Winter’s Tale (#9), the others being 7 tragedies and 6 histories.11 Whether the increased frequency for tragedies over comedies is significant conceptually remains to be seen, as the course of this chapter will investigate. Some plays have only one or two uses from the list. The highest ‘scores’ are for Romeo and Juliet (12), Hamlet (11), Cymbeline (10), Two Gentlemen of Verona, Richard II and Timon of Athens (all 9). It would be ridiculous to suggest that the relative (in)frequencies in and of themselves indicate something about the weight we might want to attach to how forgetting is used in a play. Take, for instance, the power of at least two of the four uses in Macbeth. While Ross, Angus and Banquo wait to take him to Duncan, Macbeth muses in lengthy asides about the prophecies and what action he might take to bring them about (‘If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me, / Without my stir.’, 1.3.146–7). Then, when a comment from Banquo, ‘Worthy Macbeth, we stay upon your leisure’ (151), causes Macbeth to stop his thinking aloud (to the audience), his reply is striking: ‘My dull brain was wrought / With things forgotten.’ (152–3). The choice of adjective for these unnamed and unnamable things suggests strongly and probably unintentionally that he has thought about a route to the crown before and what it might require. I might almost say that his unconscious leads him to use the adjective, for, had his addressees asked what had been forgotten, it would have required some quick thinking to come up with an acceptable list of things to present. That he calls them ‘forgotten’ speaks of a past before the play, a continuity with something thought but then put aside some time ago, either deliberately or by the forgetfulness that is inevitable. The adjective reveals, in a way unlike anything else, his ongoing ambition, ongoing since prior to the start of the play, and his willingness to act to achieve it or at least to think about acting. This (here at least unself-conscious) consideration of his own forgetting reappears at a later stage as something very much selfaware: when the women cry offstage and Seyton tells Macbeth what the ‘noise’ is, he responds ‘I have almost forgot the taste of fears’ (5.5.9).

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Though he will elaborate on the way in which ‘Direness … / Cannot once start me’ (14–15), that use of ‘almost’ suggests that he can still remember what fear is like and, perhaps, especially if the actor leans on the word, be aware that the trace memory is not only a recollection of the past emotion but also of its continued availability into this present. Simon Russell Beale (Almeida Theatre, 2005) left a long pause between ‘I have’ and ‘almost’, a space of ‘intense mental self-inspection’, part of his being a Macbeth ‘forever watching himself, looking surprised to hear himself say things, registering change in himself’;12 he spoke with a smile of wonder, suggesting that this Macbeth was almost amused to discover that this emotion he had thought completely eradicated was still present within his range of feeling. In a play strongly concerned with the collapsing of times, where, as Lady Macbeth comments, she can ‘feel now / The future in the instant’ (1.5.56–7), the past will not stay past, emotions cannot quite be erased or completely forgotten. These two moments then connect with the use of the word in the anticipation of the feast after the coronation, where, as Lady Macbeth puts it, were Banquo, whom Macbeth defines as ‘our chief guest’, to be ‘forgotten, / It had been as a gap in our great feast’ (3.1.11–12). Banquo, though dead, obstinately refuses to be forgotten, to allow the gap to exist. His presence forces Macbeth to forget his guests and to apologize, as he turns back to them with an apology ‘I do forget’ (3.4.82), a parallel with his thinking of ‘things forgotten’ while ignoring others earlier. I am also intrigued by Shakespeare’s reaching in Macbeth for a word he otherwise never uses in his plays: oblivious. Macbeth asks the doctor, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart? (5.3.40–5) This search for a medical cure from memories, a drug that can erase something ‘rooted’ in the brain by using an antidote that is sweet precisely because it can cause forgetfulness relates strongly to the

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notion of active forgetting which I have touched on throughout. Shakespeare’s use here connects with ‘death, and all oblivious enmity’ in Sonnets (55.9), the oblivion that is an enemy, as death is, and which erases all the past, creating a total oblivion. ‘Oblivious’ here is used in an uncommon though entirely acceptable early modern usage. As Randle Cotgrave in his Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (1611) defines the French oblivieux, it is both ‘Oblivious, forgetfull’ and ‘also, causing forgetfulnesse’ (sig. 3K4v), as Shakespeare uses it here. In these five moments, four spoken by Macbeth, though the last, oblivious, used in connection with what Lady Macbeth desperately needs, there are links across the play, links outwards to the limits of early modern (and indeed our own) medical treatment of the need to forget, links inwards to the sensibility and self-aware imagination of Macbeth himself, and links to all that cannot be forgotten, that intrudes even as the characters might hope to control the thought of what refuses that control. In little, it is a rich seam for thinking about the play and its modalities. It also shows how tightly its particular concern with forgetting and oblivion is tied to crucial parts of its trajectory precisely as tragedy. Here, in ways that recur, is an example of forgetting’s interconnection with a play’s internal generation of its generic definition. A full account of what Macbeth does with forgetting would need to observe its enlarging upon and provocations towards other Shakespeare plays. Taking another and markedly different point in the chain, I turn to Two Gentlemen of Verona, as a comedy, as a play with markedly more moments that speak of forgetting, and as an early work. The nine uses of the words I have isolated – and I recognize here, as elsewhere through this book, that other words, like oblivion or lethe, are also significant – show a marked convergence of semantic implication. Forgetting in Two Gentlemen speaks of something rather narrowly conceptualized. Consider these eight of the nine examples, each here left deliberately dislocated from its context: 1. Proteus to Julia: ‘And when that hour o’erslips me in the day / Wherein I sigh not, Julia, for thy sake, / The next ensuing hour some foul mischance / Torment me for my love’s forgetfulness’ (2.2.9–12) 2. Proteus alone: ‘So the remembrance of my former love / Is by a newer object quite forgotten’ (2.4.191–2)

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3. Proteus alone: ‘I will forget that Julia is alive, / Remembering that my love to her is dead’ (2.6.27–8) 4. Duke to Valentine: ‘Now therefore would I have thee to my tutor – / For long agone I have forgot to court; / Besides, the fashion of the time is changed’ (3.1.84–6) 5. Duke to Turio: ‘A little time will melt her frozen thoughts, / And worthless Valentine shall be forgot.’ (3.2.9–10) 6. Duke to Proteus: ‘What might we do to make the girl forget / The love of Valentine, and love Sir Turio?’ (3.2.29–30) 7. Julia disguised as Sebastian to Proteus: ‘She dreams on him that has forgot her love; / You dote on her that cares not for your love.’ (4.4.78–9) 8. Silvia to Julia as Sebastian: ‘Tell him from me / One Julia, that his changing thoughts forget, / Would better fit his chamber than this shadow.’ (4.4.115–17) Six of the eight are about the same act of forgetting: the effect of moving on and away from one love object. When the lover loves someone no longer because a new person has taken over the space, then the erstwhile beloved vanishes from the brain, is forgotten in being rejected. The forgetting is not literal: Beloved A is not fully forgotten when supplanted by Beloved B but the redefinition of A as formerly loved, rather than currently (and, supposedly, eternally) loved removes him/her from the frame controlled by desire. When love is conceived of as an absolute, there is no space for two individuals to co-exist within the space defined as the love object. Vacating the label is analogized as having been forgotten. In a sense forgetting here becomes a performance of forgetting (see p. 13), a pretense that the memory of A has been deleted. It is analogous to the usage, nineteenth century and later, of ‘forget it’ to mean, as OED politely puts it, ‘take no more notice of it, don’t mention it’ (forget, v., 1.a). The memory of the former has not been deleted but the lover can behave as if it had been. Not all forgetting is forgotten. There are other obligations on the lover that are here defined within a space of memory and forgetting. The first quotation defines the consequence of a failure to demonstrate the effects of love every single hour, for not to constantly recognize that the self loves and

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therefore sighs would be to exist in a state of forgetfulness, to have forgotten always to be the lover whom Jaques in As You Like It will define as ‘Sighing like furnace’ (2.7.149). The fourth passage speaks of the need to get up-to-date tutoring in the arts of courtship, if one has been out of practice for a while. It is not enough simply to be in love; one must also be a fashionable lover and wooer. Six of the eight define the male as the lover who forgets. The other two, both from the Duke, are, first (#5), a statement to a would-be lover that Silvia will forget Valentine and, second (#6), a question: ‘What might we do to make the girl forget … ?’ The answer is, of course, nothing but it is an assumption of male power over female desire that it can even be asked. For the Duke, the question only makes sense if he assumes that such compulsion is possible. Indeed, it is driven by his intentions: ‘Thou [sc. Proteus] know’st how willingly I would effect / The match between Sir Turio and my daughter’ (22–3). Paternal power seeks to make a match and his daughter’s wishes must be made to conform. While the men choose to forget, the woman must be made to forget. The gender divide is stark and disturbing. The ninth and last occurrence in the play is the only one to exist outside the framework of love, desire and the consequences of inconstancy. In the last moments of the play, the Duke, rejecting Turio for placing his own safety over his love, turns to Valentine: I do applaud thy spirit, Valentine, And think thee worthy of an empress’ love. Know then, I here forget all former griefs, Cancel all grudge, repeal thee home again, Plead a new state in thy unrivalled merit … (5.4.139–43) This makes of forgetting that act of social power that I explored within the concept of ‘forgive and forget’ in Chapter 2. Alone of the nine usages it moves the word’s field unequivocally from love to power, the right of the ruler to perform forgetting, to choose to make acts into something no longer to be considered, be they griefs or grudges. Forgetting is a potent and complex matter in this play: the forgotten and rejected beloved keeps reappearing, refusing to stay

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forgotten and abandoned. It becomes a crucial part of the play’s narrative dynamic by making an expression of desire also often observed by the person previously desired, now watching either unseen or disguised and therefore unknown. As it moves towards its ending it has to cope with its own choice of two events that seem bound together: the act of violence that is Proteus’s attempted rape of Silvia and the act of friendship that, moments later, has Valentine tell the would-be rapist ‘All that was mine in Silvia I give thee’ (5.4.83). A mere twenty-five lines after the brutality of Proteus’s ‘I’ll force thee yield to my desire’ (59), Valentine’s handing Silvia over – and of course he does not ask Silvia what she might think of this action – strikes modern audiences and readers as almost incomprehensible, as if Valentine has forgotten the rape that he has just interrupted and prevented. Wriggle as editors and critics might, as they try to find ways in which Valentine’s act might be less thoroughly objectionable,13 they have to cope with what seems like a massive lurch in the texture of the play, a moment of such complete aberrancy that it can come close to being unplayable. As often in Shakespeare, the woman is silenced: after she cries ‘O heaven!’ as Proteus attacks her (5.4.59), Silvia never speaks again. Critics can find in the abruptness of the transitions at the end of the play, as Jonathan Bate puts it, ‘a sign of impatience or immaturity on Shakespeare’s part’, an early example of the fact that ‘he never really cared for endings’.14 But abrupt transitions are also the sign of the male lovers’ determination of desire in this play, something that becomes increasingly disturbing as it goes along. The association of male – and indeed female – desire with forgetting in Two Gentlemen of Verona, something we might see as characteristic of its male-dominated comedy, reappears in, for example, an exchange early in Romeo and Juliet. As Benvolio tries to encourage Romeo to stop obsessing about Rosaline, especially since Romeo insists that he has tried everything to overcome the fact that ‘She hath forsworn to love’ (1.1.221), he offers a solution: ‘Be ruled by me, forget to think of her’ (223), to which Romeo responds, ‘O, teach me how I should forget to think!’ (224). The riff on forgetting continues: ‘He that is strucken blind cannot forget / The precious treasure of his eyesight lost … / Farewell, thou canst not teach me to forget.’ (230–1, 235). Characteristic of the word play of the opening scenes, it reappears in the ‘balcony’ scene (see p. 177):

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juliet I have forgot why I did call thee back. romeo Let me stand here till thou remember it. juliet I shall forget to have thee still stand there, Remembering how I love thy company. romeo And I’ll still stay to have thee still forget, Forgetting any other home but this. (2.2.170–5) In the stasis of desire, the love of still standing and standing still with the loved one, the forgetting acts as the prompt for immobility, a state that the later frenetic impetus of the play makes impossible. It also anticipates in the stillness of their stasis their eventual transformation, as part of the rival giving of the two fathers, into statues after the end of the play (and as living statues in some recent productions): ‘For I will raise her statue in pure gold … / As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie’ (5.3.299, 303). This early Juliet may remember but she can perform continuing to forget in order to have Romeo’s ‘company’. When Romeo forgets again, it is again within the framework that is recognizable from the earlier Verona play, Two Gentlemen: when Friar Laurence asks him ‘Wast thou with Rosaline?’, his reply echoes Proteus, ‘With Rosaline, my ghostly father? No, / I have forgot that name and that name’s woe.’ (2.3.40–2). To state the obvious, Romeo has not forgotten her name nor the woe he experienced in loving her but he can now act as if he had forgotten both. There is a different kind of forgetting in two other occurrences, this time not of love and desire but a form of comic performance: as the Nurse rattles on, in her bravura performance of unstoppable repetition as she replays and enjoys her memories of time past, she twice intersperses them with ‘I never shall [or should] forget it’ (1.3.25, 48).15 What the Nurse remembers she has to keep repeating, something that, in a very different vein, is also characteristic of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s Play (first performed in 1964). The very inverse of forgetfulness, her memories of the infant Juliet, particularly the four times repeated punch-line to the story of her fall – variants of ‘It stinted and said “Ay”’ – point to forgetting in order to deny it.

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This usage is analogous to the injunction to ‘remember not’, as in Sonnet 71, ‘ … if you read this line, remember not / The hand that writ it’ (71.5–6), or the reminding someone that they have forgotten someone else, as in Prospero’s telling Alonso that ‘There are yet missing of your company / Some few odd lads that you remember not’ (5.1.254–5). Perhaps most remarkably, the last of the seventeen occurrences of remember in 2 Henry IV is when, waiting to interrupt Henry V’s coronation procession, that moment when the King will show that Henry as King performs having forgotten him, Falstaff imagines, in frenetic anxiety, that his ‘earnestness of affection’ and ‘devotion’ are best shown by the fact that he has not spent time preparing: ‘to ride day and night and not to deliberate, not to remember, not to have patience to shift me’ (5.5.16–22). The fact of not remembering now leads towards being forgotten; his ‘thinking of nothing else’ is by ‘putting all affairs else in oblivion’ (25–6), as the King will put him, refusing to know him or to show that he remembers his name: ‘I know thee not, old man’ (46). Falstaff is not clear quite what he is not to remember, unless each of the three verbs (deliberate, remember, have patience) point to his not having changed his clothes, something that would have been a sign of preparation.16 As Prince Henry told Poins earlier in the play, ‘What a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name, … or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as: one for superfluity and another for use’ (2.2.12–17). The Nurse can never forget Juliet’s reply to the Nurse’s husband; Romeo and Juliet wish Juliet would stay in the state of having forgotten what she was about to say since it will keep them in that timeless moment of the lover’s presence.17 Both these forms connect with the last forget in the play, a desire by Juliet to forget but being unable to forget: Some word there was, worser than Tybalt’s death, That murdered me. I would forget it fain, But O, it presses to my memory Like damned guilty deeds to sinners’ minds. Tybalt is dead and Romeo banished; That ‘banishd’, that one word ‘banished’ Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts. (3.2.108–14)

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Not to be able to forget is set against the Nurse’s joy in her inability to forget and against Juliet’s earlier inability to remember. In the play’s shift from a possible stay in the genre of comedy to the impossibility of escaping the genre of fatalist tragedy, the impossible wish to forget signifies the unavoidability of its entrapment in its tragic genre. This play has nothing else it needs to or can say about its forgettings and it will end with the promise of erecting those statues of Juliet and Romeo, an act of commemoration that is both civic and funerary remembrance. Inaugurated by that promise, Romeo and Juliet refuse ever to be forgotten. My argument has begun to sketch, then, the forms of forgetting in the two genres with which I am concerned. Romeo and Juliet reinforces what I have been tracing precisely at the moment at which Juliet becomes aware of the kind of narrative which Romeo’s killing Tybalt has created, the irreversible switch out of potential comedy and into tragedy. The move from the performance of forgetting to the impossibility of forgetting marks that switch. I am as yet far from proposing that all occurrences of the words with which I am concerned fall neatly into one of the two categories I have so far tested. There is nothing here that matches what Alice Leonard argues as generic differentiation in the use of error: ‘The central difference between the occurrence of error in comedy and in tragedy is that in comedy it is casual and in tragedy it is causal.’18 But in the ways in which the gap between what The Two Gentelmen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet do with forgetting and as each maps it over the gender of the character forgetting there is something that is, at the very least, suggestive of the consequences of generic distinction. What, then, of Cymbeline, the play which so perfectly fits Polonius’s extreme version of the mixed genre play? As Anne Barton wrote, When he allowed Polonius, in Hamlet, to make a fool of himself by inventing a class of play called the ‘tragical-comical-historicalpastoral’, Shakespeare presumably did not foresee that he would write Cymbeline.19 I turn to it not only because of the multiplicity of its genres but also because it is a high-scoring play in my table and therefore would seem to promise to reward consideration. The word-form begins

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to make its appearance in Imogen’s first meeting with Iachimo. As Iachimo begins to belie Posthumus, offering his ‘report’ of Posthumus’s unfaithfulness, Imogen responds ‘My lord, I fear, / Has forgot Britain’ and Iachimo expands the thought with ‘And himself’ (1.7.110–11). As Posthumus supposedly forgets himself as well as his country and – implicitly, for Imogen will not mention herself directly – its Princess, the sense of self-forgetting as being a forgetting of honourable action as well as nation surfaces. This seems promising enough as a field of dramatic enquiry but Shakespeare proves not to pursue it with any vigour. When Iachimo, about to leave, feigns forgetting to ask Imogen to look after the trunk, ‘I had almost forgot / T’entreat your grace but in a small request’ (1.7.178–9), it is almost realist in its form, no trace of an echo of her thought of Posthumus’s forgetting Britain. I could argue that, when Cymbeline tells Cloten, who is complaining about Imogen’s ignoring his musical offerings, that ‘The exile of her minion is too new. / She hath not yet forgot him’ (2.3.39–40), this is a kind of parallel to Imogen’s that Posthumus has forgotten Britain (= her). But I would find the argument a little too forced, though it does chime with my suggestion that men assume women will forget a lover in the way that men certainly do. When Imogen, irritated by Cloten, tells him that ‘You put me to forget a lady’s manners’ (2.3.103), it anticipates something that will reappear later in the play, after the uninteresting moment when Iachimo, reporting back to Posthumus, describes Imogen’s chamber and then recalls the ‘andirons’ with ‘I had forgot them’ (2.4.88–9). Not all usages are equally weighty and I have no wish to give Iachimo’s here a spurious gravity. But Imogen forgetting her gender’s appropriate behaviour is echoed when Pisanio suggests she disguise herself: ‘You must forget to be a woman … Nay, you must / Forget that rarest treasure of your cheek … and forget / Your laboursome and dainty trims’ (3.4.153–63). The performance of gender reversal involves forgetting as a form of laying aside. It is not that Imogen must forget her gender but rather remember it and discard what the somatic performance of that gender is as embodiment, in favour of the gender reversal she is to perform. It is, in short, a form of active forgetting: remember not to do something, remember not to think in the way that your gender has habituated you, remember not to move as women move, dress as women dress, and so on.

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The last two link to Cloten. Typically muddled, he remembers, just as Pisanio leaves him that ‘I forgot to ask him one thing, I’ll remember’t anon’ (3.5.130–1), an example of the kind of realist forgetting, forgetting what we needed to ask, what we were about to say, what we should have remembered to say. Soon enough, after Guiderius has killed Cloten and the body of Fidele is discovered, Belarius can tell the young men ‘Great griefs, I see, med’cine the less, for Cloten / Is quite forgot’ (4.2.242–3). The forgetful Cloten is himself forgotten, just as it will be a long way into the sequence of revelations at the play’s end before Cymbeline thinks of mentioning that the queen’s ‘son / Is gone, we know not how nor where’ and, once Pisanio has described how Cloten set off for Milford Haven, Guiderius admits ‘I slew him there’ (5.4.272–4, 287). And that completes the word-form’s journey through Cymbeline. It is nothing like as rewarding as my earlier examples in this chapter but then nor would I expect every such consideration to be equally productive. I have included it precisely because it does not offer much, though it confirms what I have been outlining. I am not going to suggest that that is in any way bound up with Shakespeare’s approach to genre in Cymbeline. It does not seem to me to be a convincing argument to propose that the range of implications in the word-string here is part of the mixed genre form. I do not intend to work ponderously through each and every play but it does seem worth exploring Troilus and Cressida, a play that has had virtually no attention in Shakespeare memory studies. The explicit forgetting, as I might term its presence in the dialogue rather than in the consciousness of characters or of the audience, starts with a combination of Thersites and a prayer to Jove. Alone onstage, inveighing against Ajax and Achilles, Thersites calls on thou great thunder-darter of Olympus, forget that thou art Jove, the king of gods; and Mercury, lose all the serpentine craft of thy caduceus, if ye take not that little, little, less than little wit from them that they have … (2.3.10–14) Thersites’s invective as prayer imagines both a Jove who can forget himself, is able not to be aware of being Jove, and a Jove who would be obligated to do that, to be forgetful in that way, if he fails to accede to the prayer. The intercessionary logic of asking a god to

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do something which, if he fails to do it, results in his stopping being a god has a delicious illogicality that is the pure venom of Thersites’s railing. It is there, too, in the prayer’s close, an invocation of an accompanying closure from an ungodlike source: ‘I have said my prayers, and devil Envy say “Amen”’ (20–1). Thersites is imagining a moment in a near future in which Jove might not be Jove. Cressida swears an oath to be true to Troilus or else to be known forever as the epitome of falsehood, an oath that redefines what being Cressida might risk becoming: If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth, When time is old and hath forgot itself, When water-drops have worn the stones of Troy, And blind oblivion swallowed cities up …             … yet let memory, From false to false, among false maids in love, Upbraid my falsehood! (3.2.180–7) This is a play that is fascinated by the threat of oblivion, more so than any other of Shakespeare’s. Soon after this moment, Ulysses, as crafty as Mercury, offers Achilles an image of Time: Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, A great-sized monster of ingratitudes. Those scraps are good deeds past, which are Devoured as fast as they are made, forgot As soon as done. (3.3.147–52) The wallet carried behind proverbially bore one’s vices which, as it were, one had symbolically forgotten. But Time’s wallet is the location for gifts that are ‘good deeds past’ and are quickly forgotten. The idea of Time as a site and a sign of forgetfulness is classical. Commentators argue whether the monster is Time or oblivion, Arden 3 preferring the former and Arden 2 the latter.20 In either case, Shakespeare in Rape of Lucrece images ‘Time’s glory’ as including its ability ‘To feed oblivion with decay of things’ (ll.939, 947). Agamemnon will see the connection of oblivion and time as

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not only relating to the past but also to a future: ‘What’s past and what’s to come is strewed with husks / And formless ruin of oblivion’ (4.5.167–8). That phrase ‘husks and formless ruin’ is immensely powerful. It suggests both the traces left behind and the extent to which they are devoid of form. His is an even more universal nihilism of the destructive power of time where, for Cressida, there is a sense of time, in Ovid’s use of a common phrase, as tempus edax rerum, ‘Time the devourer of things’,21 consuming itself by forgetting itself, like some ultimate victim of Alzheimer’s, so old that it forgets itself, that forgetfulness that is also a devourer that ‘swallowed cities up’. In that self-consuming image, she, unknowingly, echoes Ulysses on appetite: ‘And appetite, an universal wolf, / So doubly seconded with will and power, / Must make perforce an universal prey, / And last eat up himself’ (1.3.121–4). Ulysses’s image of Time emerges out of his own advice to Agamemnon: ‘Achilles stands i’th’ entrance of his tent. / Please it our general pass strangely by him, / As if he were forgot.’ (3.3.38– 40). Achilles’ response to this behaviour is to ask Ulysses ‘What, are my deeds forgot?’ (146). Forgetting Achilles and his deeds is no more than a trick, yet another performance of forgetting, in order to try to re-engage Achilles in the war but it leads to this larger, terrifying notion of Time’s wallet. Pretending to have forgotten Achilles by ignoring him opens up, as so often in this play, a move from the individual to the general within a framework of time, not least in the wide gap of time between the legendary events of the Trojan War as history and the present of the play’s performance of a less than legendary ironizing of the same events, a moment of ‘what’s to come’ that marks out that vast space between the mythichistoric past and the not-yet-state of present oblivion – a not-yetstate because the character anticipates it as a future, even though it is the play’s performative present and that of its audience. Always conscious of its exploration of a fixed narrative that is skewed in Shakespeare’s redefinition of it, Troilus and Cressida unravels with its own knowing of its own forgetting, re-establishing itself as a new real, a new present, a new moment that in turn will eventually be no more than ‘husks and formless ruin’. In such an apocalyptic context, Cressida’s comment later of her separation from her family, in particular her father, when she is forced to leave Troy, seems almost mild:

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I will not, uncle. I have forgot my father. I know no touch of consanguinity; No kin, no love, no blood, no soul so near me As the sweet Troilus. (4.2.97–100) It is not unreasonable to love Troilus beyond her absent father or her present uncle but kinship and ‘consanguinity’ cannot be redefined like this. This is, one might say, what Polonius described as ‘the very ecstasy of love’ (Hamlet, 2.1.99). It involves what, in comedy, I would see as a conventionally troped response to the blocking senex, the father who prevents the young lovers from being together. But here it is in a context far more absolute even than the presence of that trope in a tragedy like Romeo and Juliet, with, here, the physical displacement of Cressida from inside the city without her father to outside the city with her father, from the patrimony of Troy to the tents of the enemy Greeks. With that classically Shakespearean introduction of a new character round the mid-point of the play – Calchas first appears at the start of what is now marked as 3.3 – there is a new plot dynamic that literally relocates Cressida. It also requires her to make that move as part of the exchange of prisoners event, making Cressida into a kind of prisoner to be exchanged for Antenor, for she is imprisoned into being her father’s daughter, unable to resist this touch of consanguinity, even as she talks to her uncle whom, throughout the play, she so consistently identifies by his kinship term, calling him ‘uncle’ fourteen times in all in only four scenes,22 occasionally prefixed with terms like ‘good’ (twice), ‘sweet’ or ‘naughty mocking’. Cressida cannot be allowed to forget her father. The woman here wishes to forget but is refused that option by the paternalist power of Calchas’s demand that Cressida be his reward. The mechanism for the action of the play depends on what cannot be forgotten, on remembering a familial structure that has a power effect that outlives the time of the play and time in the play to become that identity that Troilus, Cressida and Pandarus prefigure themselves becoming. Pandarus offers it as another prayer that we might hear as echoing that of Thersites: ‘Let all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids, and all brokers-between panders! Say “Amen”.’

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(3.2.198–200). If the first and second of these have not remained true, have become those ‘husks’ that are part of the denial of form in that ‘ruin of oblivion’, the third has not been forgotten and has become a common rather than proper noun for an improper function, arriving into English through Boccaccio’s influence on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Troilus and Cressida, I am arguing, negotiates complexly and profoundly with the multiple times in which it exists, from legendary past to performed present and it does so in terms both of memory and forgetting. In that way it matches the processes of Antony and Cleopatra which, as Elizabeth Hodgson has argued, moves ‘in Cleopatra’s case at least, away from this complex praise and fear of forgetting and towards a greater and greater emphasis on social memory’.23 Hodgson’s argument moves beyond Garrett Sullivan’s account of the play as, especially in Antony’s case, an exploration of self-forgetfulness, where Cleopatra shows ‘the foundationality of forgetting to each of their intertwined identities’.24 For Hodgson, Cleopatra and her court seem ‘to keep suggesting that being utterly forgotten is not just a strange but necessary part of individual subjectivity’ and ‘the oblivion of death … an obligatory means to protect the idea of a genuinely distributed consciousness’ (276). The more they imagine their deaths the more aware they – and we – are that they may be forgotten. Knowing one may be remembered is also to know one may be forgotten. Long before that, Cleopatra, taking her leave of Antony as he is about to leave Egypt, stops mid-sentence:     Something it is I would – O, my oblivion is a very Antony, And I am all forgotten! (1.3.91–3) As so often with Cleopatra, there is an ambiguity about whether this forgetfulness is real or performed. Does she know what she was about to say and feigns forgetting or has she really forgotten? Actors can play either. And the lines themselves have an ambiguity: ‘my oblivion’ can mean ‘my forgetfulness’ or ‘my being forgotten’; ‘I am all forgotten’ could mean ‘I have completely forgotten what I was going to say’ or ‘I am entirely forgotten by Antony’. Oblivion can become here that fear of being forgotten by others but it can as

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readily point to her own inability to remember. In these two options the role can move between the individual and the socio-cultural, the forgetting by her and the forgetting of her. Later Cleopatra will identify a consequence for blameless others if she forgets: ‘Who’s born that day / When I forget to send to Antony / Shall die a beggar.’ (1.5.66–8). Maecenas will encourage Antony and Octavius to ‘enforce no further / The griefs between ye; to forget them quite / Were to remember that the present need / Speaks to atone you’ (2.2.105–8). When Enobarbus speaks in response to this, Antony silences him and Enobarbus (grumpily?) comments ‘That truth should be silent, I had almost forgot.’ (115). Forgetting seems in this play to cluster around Antony but he, neither here nor later, speaks of it himself. Unlike, say, Two Gentlemen of Verona, here it is the woman who speaks most often of forgetting, not the man. In her monument, a space of monumentalizing, Cleopatra imagines and brings into effect both her mortality and immortality, both the possibility of being forgotten (that sense of ‘I am all forgotten’) and the inevitability of being enshrined – I use the word’s religious tone deliberately – into a collective memory. Practicing death and preparing for death, ‘She hath pursued conclusions infinite / Of easy ways to die’ (5.2.353–4), for, as North’s Plutarch explains, ‘to make proofe of those poysons which made men die with the least paine, she tried it upon condemned men in prison … [and] found none of all them she had proved so fit, as the biting of an Aspicke’.25 Hodgson argues that Octavius’s comment that ‘No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous’ (357–8) only implies that the grave itself will be famous ‘so that they will not be forgotten’ but that ‘he actually declares … that the two dead bodies are famous, not that their grave will be … [for] it will be, as Shakespeare knew, … anonymous and forgotten’ (285). Certainly there was to be no monument at their grave, no tourist destination to mark their love, and yet the play itself becomes, as I would argue, the space where their fame is remembered and their deaths not forgotten. So, too, Troilus and Cressida plays with and on its own forgetfulness, ostending and withdrawing the lure of being remembered to be as true as Troilus and as false as Cressida. What the narrative bequeaths to the current generation as its audience is not the lovers’ fame nor their emblematic exemplarity but something far nastier: as Pandarus puts it, ‘Till then I’ll sweat and seek about

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for eases, / And at that time bequeath you my diseases.’ (5.11.55– 6).26 Bequests are, as John Kerrigan points out, part of a last will and testament, a promise of what will happen when an individual dies: ‘Pandarus leaves us with the promise of that promise, and the most durable of bonds – love’s ultimate, sick tokens, to be circulated through the brothels and playhouses after he has gone.’27 While his self-formation transcends time and the threat of oblivion, the lovers’ predictions of their own names’ survival do not. What the play’s playing with forgetting and oblivion resonates with is the anthropologist Marc Augé’s exploration, at the very end of his moving meditation, of the binding of oblivion to time: Oblivion brings us back to the present, even if it is conjugated in every tense: in the future, to live the beginning; in the present, to live the moment; in the past, to live the return; in every case, in order not to be repeated. We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful.28 Earlier he describes that pattern as one that, ‘where oblivion is concerned, all tenses are present tenses, because the past gets lost in it or finds itself again, and the future is only sketched out in it’.29 Troilus and Cressida sketches that form of oblivion as future, for its characters are, as Troilus says of Cressida when he sees her with Diomedes, both themselves and not themselves: ‘This is and is not Cressid’ (5.2.153). They have forgotten who they were in Homer or even in Chaucer, becoming viciously and magnificently ironized parodies of themselves, less self-forgetting than having been forgotten by Shakespeare to the extent that they are now unable to act (in all senses) as themselves. This Cressida both is and is not false, this Troilus true and not true, just as Agamemnon is and is not a great general and so on. They carry with themselves, in their husks of themselves, the formlessness of having been brought back from oblivion into a new form of being whose connection to their own past states is profoundly problematized. No wonder A. P. Rossiter, in a final flourish to his lecture on the play, offers something as magnificently parodic as the play itself: One character alone comes out of it without a scratch: Antenor … But perhaps you have not noticed him? Never mind, you will

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next time you read the play. He never speaks a line; he never utters a word. I see in him the prophetic outline of the average man of good will involved in war: never knowing why he is there nor what is really going on …, most certainly, Shakespeare’s one strong silent man.30 Once unnoticed, now never to be forgotten (at least if one has read Rossiter), Shakespeare’s Antenor in his marginality stands against oblivion. So complex and subtle, intense and imaginative is Shakespeare’s thinking almost every time he uses the word-group that it has seemed to me sometimes, as I am working my way down the listings in a concordance, as if each occurrence adds something more, something not quite found elsewhere to the mining of the semantics of forgetting. Sometimes, of course, an example might not be Shakespeare at all but his collaborator in one of the plays that were not solo-authored. It seems likely, for instance, that the following exchange in Timon of Athens is Middleton’s, not Shakespeare’s: flavius … My dearest master! timon Away! What art thou? flavius Have you forgot me, sir? timon Why dost ask that? I have forgot all men. Then, if thou grant’st thou’rt a man, I have forgot thee. (4.3.467–70) Timon’s sweeping generalizing transforms the forgotten individual into the forgetting of all humanity, just as the play offers a disquisition on what it means to be humane as well as human, two words indistinguishable and inseparable in early modern orthography. Flavius cannot be known to Timon because Flavius self-defines as ‘An honest poor servant of yours’ and Timon ‘never had honest man about me’. Flavius cannot be male because he weeps and therefore is ‘a woman’ and not ‘Flinty mankind, whose eyes do never give / But thorough lust and laughter’ (471–3, 479–81). The all-inclusive

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category of ‘all men’ subdivides into different categories to which Flavius may or may not belong. This dialogue may well not be Shakespeare’s but it picks up resonances from much earlier in this massive scene, in passages that are almost certainly Shakespeare’s: Alcibiades speaks to Timon of the way that he has ‘heard and grieved / How cursed Athens, mindless of thy worth, / Forgetting thy great deeds …’ (4.3.92–4); and Apemantus, early in his two-hundred-line duologue with Timon, surely the longest duologue in the whole of Shakespeare, tells him that ‘Thy flatterers … / … have forgot / That ever Timon was’ (205–7). These are two moments when all or part of Athens forgets Timon and lead towards what Timon has forgotten. In turn, Alcibiades’s comment here echoes his earlier lines to the senators, ‘I cannot think but your age has forgot me’ (3.6.92, probably by Middleton), just as Timon on Flavius’s tears echoes his comment to his guests on his own tears: ‘mine eyes cannot hold out water, methinks. To forget their faults, I drink to you’ (1.2.106–7), this time surely Middleton echoing Middleton. In performance – and indeed in reading without checking an editor’s definition of the two authors’ shares in the play – the words connect, irrespective of who wrote them. That exchange between Flavius and Timon with which I began this segment becomes part of the corpus of the works of Shakespeare in F1 and within any edition of Timon, with, perhaps, the only exception being its presence in the 2007 edition of Thomas Middleton’s Collected Works.31 I turn finally to The Tempest, because, not least, it does what I have suggested Cymbeline does not do in negotiating forgetting in terms of its genre identity.32 In addition, the play uses the words to redefine how power operates, how enslavement controls memory and forgetting. Sometimes, of course, Shakespeare uses the word with simple and familiar resonances. As Ferdinand thinks about Miranda’s reaction to his labour of moving logs, an activity that, especially in performance as the logs move from one part of the stage to another, can seem purposely pointless, a task without meaning other than the humiliation of the worker by the authority Prospero uses over him, so Ferdinand stops working, exhausted but also enjoying the thought of his beloved. Then, ‘[a]fter these reveries, Ferdinand reminds himself to get back to work’33 with ‘I forget’

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(3.1.13). When Miranda enters a couple of lines later, he is hard at work. Wrapped up in those thoughts, he for a moment or two forgets his obligation. Love, I suggested earlier, can in comedy make the (usually male) lover forget the previous love object. In this scene love makes Miranda, who has never loved before, forget her father’s rules, ‘But I prattle / Something too wildly, and my father’s precepts / I therein do forget’ (57–9), just as earlier, in telling Ferdinand her name, she invokes her father, whom she thinks absent but whom the audience can see observing, ‘O my father, / I have broke your hest to say so’ (36–7). Prospero is, in some respects, comedy’s blocking senex here and, as so often, it is the woman whose father makes the rules that she breaks when in love. This loving exchange in this central scene is a world apart from the emphasis on forgetting that Prospero places when talking to Ariel in their first duologue, using it four times in fourteen lines, first in evoking his freeing of Ariel, ‘Dost thou forget / From what a torment I did free thee?’ (1.2.251–2), and then in connection with evoking Sycorax:             … hast thou forgot The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy Was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her? ariel No, sir. prospero  Thou hast! Where was she born? Speak; tell me. ariel Sir, in Algiers. prospero    O, was she so! I must Once in a month recount what thou hast been, Which thou forget’st. (257–63) This master–slave language, denying the slave’s answers as true, forcing an endless repetition, month by month, of the supposed freedom that Prospero has given Ariel, has a brutality that is terrifying. Prospero refuses Ariel’s control over the traumatic memory of pain, making him re-experience it through the interrogation. Ariel gives no sign of having forgotten anything about his past but is deliberately being tormented by the summoning up of the past, inadequately

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repressed as it is. The master’s power and the slave’s powerlessness are defined by the former’s demands on the latter’s mind. No wonder that in Karin Beier’s multilingual 1997 production of the play, Der Sturm, at the Cologne Schauspiel, the single word that the Italian actor playing Ariel could utter independently of repeating what others said was ‘libertà’, standing at the front edge of the stage and stretching her arms out yearningly towards the audience. As Stephano sings, ‘Thought is free’ (3.2.124), but that is not true for the enslaved Ariel whose master demands his remembering. The daughter does forget and the slave is told that he has forgotten. The former marks her love, the latter his servitude. Forgetting is culturally defined for us as characteristic of age. As Shakespeare’s Henry V puts it, ‘Old men forget’ (4.3.49), as he rouses his troops before Agincourt with the image of a future when the old soldier who ‘shall see this day and live old age’ will ‘remember, with advantages, / What feats he did that day’ (44, 50–1). In The Tempest, as Sebastian and Antonio listen and mock Gonzalo’s image of a perfect commonwealth, they trace the faults in his logic. On the one hand Gonzago’s Ovidian golden age fantasy depends on his being King of ‘this isle’ (2.1.149, 151); on the other, he envisages ‘No sovereignty’: sebastian Yet he would be king on’t. antonio The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. (159–60) As the play studies modes of rule, from Prospero’s abusive use of power over Ariel and Caliban through Antonio’s supplanting the rightful duke to the restoration of proper rule in the future, Gonzalo creates a vision of an eco-friendly society in which ‘nature should bring forth / Of its own kind all foison, all abundance, / To feed my innocent people’ (164–6). Imagining being king in a state with no sovereignty is a paradox but one that is not therefore as forgetful as Antonio and Sebastian assume. After all, Gonzalo begins with a clear statement that ‘I’th’ commonwealth I would by contraries / Execute all things’ (149–50). The paradox is part of the impossibility of the vision, as Gonzalo anticipates. Beyond both the magic of the island and the normative reality back in Naples and

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Milan lies a classical imagining that neither Shakespeare’s culture nor our own is able to forget. I touched earlier on Alice Leonard’s suggestion that error in Shakespeare’s tragedy is ‘causal’.34 The final forgetting in The Tempest is exactly that, a causal intervention into the play’s structure that is irrevocably disturbing of its form.35 As Mark Rose showed in 1972,36 The Tempest has a quite extraordinary scenic shape, what he called its identity as ‘one of the most disciplined, most severely controlled plays in the canon’. There are only nine scenes in all, the fewest in a Shakespeare play since he wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The middle scene, the fifth, is 3.1, the log-carrying scene. The scene before it, the fourth, 2.2, has Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo and so too does the sixth, 3.2. The scene before that, the third, 2.1, is a ‘lords’ scene for Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian and so too is the seventh, 3.3. The scene before that, 2.1, ends with Prospero, Ferdinand and Miranda and the eighth scene, 4.1, starts with the same group of characters. As Rose sums it up, ‘Surrounding the centerpiece, and accounting for almost the entire play, is thus an extraordinary triple frame comprised of distinct character groups’ (173). We can go further than Rose, for the play’s opening scene introduces as the first two characters brought onstage the ship’s Master and Boatswain, two people who will not reappear again until the end of the play’s last scene, providing yet another character group, marking a further frame to the play and, beyond even that, one might see the opening storm echoed in the storm of applause that Prospero’s epilogue calls for, the clapping and the ‘Gentle breath of yours’ (Epil. 11) that will provide the wind to send his ship home to Milan. This is an abstract structure, something I can observe in reading but which I cannot follow in time. Indeed, when I have shown it to theatre directors about to direct the play, they recognize its accuracy but have only ever come up with the suggestion of a series of lighting colours as a means of communicating it to the audience. Even if Shakespeare’s playgoers had a more highly developed spatial-temporal awareness than we do, I find it unlikely that they would have noticed it. Yet the shape is there, fanning out from the centre. It breaks down at the end of the masque, when Prospero disrupts the revels, that moment when the performers of a masque

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and members of the group of spectators – here just Miranda and Ferdinand – would join together to dance. It breaks down not because of something that happens in the performance but because, ‘towards the end’ of the dance of nymphs and reapers, ‘Prospero starts suddenly and speaks; after which, to a strange, hollow and confused noise, they heavily vanish’ (4.1.138.2–4).37 What he ‘speaks’ is ‘I had forgot that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates / Against my life. The minute of their plot / Is almost come’ and then he orders the spirit-performers ‘Well done. Avoid; no more.’ (139–42). It breaks down, in other words, when and because Prospero loses control, forgets something, allows the conspiracy to drop out of his awareness and the power that he has used to define the play’s shape so far, ever since, as Ariel says, ‘as thou bad’st me, / In troops I have dispersed them ’bout the isle’ (1.2.219–20). I would argue that the irruption into the play at this point of Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo forms an antimasque that has lost its proper place as ‘ante’, before the masque, and instead points to the prematurity of Prospero’s celebrations of the betrothal. The play cannot yet end, not before it can find some way of even in part accommodating what it – or rather its director, Prospero – has forgotten. People can forget but the play needs the consciousness and inclusion that in Act 4 – and Tempest is plainly a play self-aware of its five-act form as its scenic shape – it has not yet achieved. At a moment of such exceptional metatheatrical self- consciousness, both the action of The Tempest and the mind of its central controlling character need to remember what they had forgotten. However one reads the end of the play, the tormenting of Caliban and his confederates needs to modulate to the lesser tortures of cleaning up Prospero’s cave: ‘Go, sirrah, to my cell. / Take with you your companions. As you look / To have my pardon, trim it handsomely.’ (5.1.293–4). The final punishment for this act of treason and attempted murder, after ‘diverse Sprits, in shape of dogs and hounds, hunting them about’ (4.1.254.1–2), is nothing more than a little house-cleaning. In so many ways, Prospero’s awareness of what he has forgotten is pivotal to the play’s unfolding plot and form. It will lead to whatever transformations, resolutions and reconciliations are possible by the end, an end that has seemed to some as yet incomplete. Dramatists as different as Francis Godolphin Waldron, in his The Virgin Queen

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(1797), and Ernest Renan, in his ‘philosophical drama’ Caliban (1878), wrote sequels to the play. W. H. Auden’s long poem The Sea and the Mirror (1944) is, as the subtitle indicates, ‘A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, full of perceptions of the gaps Shakespeare leaves unfilled as the play’s characters speak in the poem, looking back over the play’s action from beyond its end. Though Prospero has recalled what he had forgotten, though he can move the play towards some kind of conclusion, he cannot produce any full close and Shakespeare does not offer us a way of doing so either. Forgetfulness, however temporary, leaves behind it an absence, marked and unfilled in the play’s shaping, even as it finally is enabled to reach a conclusion appropriate to comedy.

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As I move to place the event of forgetting not within the play by its characters but instead as a forgetting of the play by its spectators, I want to turn now to a form of forgetting that is usually unmarked, a forgetting most often defined simply by an absence that is never commented on but which acts as a gap of memory, a gulf into which meaning floods when – or perhaps that should be ‘if’ – the playgoers note what is missing. Actually, the way in which this very different device operates is usually not a matter of what is missing but rather of who is missing. Perhaps the most familiar example of this event is one where the absence is noticed, where the audience is reminded of what it has shared in forgetting, when the missing characters are no longer forgotten in a way that makes us aware of having for a while been forgetful about them. Let me summarize a sequence of action at the end of King Lear. Edgar narrates, at some length, what has happened to his father. He then describes the arrival of ‘a man’ who ‘Told the most piteous tale of Lear and him’ and, ‘in recounting / His grief grew puissant and the strings of life / Began to crack’ (5.3.207, 213–6). Across the fifteen lines of this part of his story, Edgar fails to name the man, prompting Albany to ask ‘But who was this?’ and, as Edgar now insistently names Kent, ‘Kent, sir, the banished Kent’ (217–18), he is interrupted by the arrival of a man with the report of the deaths of Goneril and Regan. Edgar sees Kent entering and Kent is welcomed apologetically by Albany: ‘The time will not allow the compliment / Which very manners urges.’ (232–3). Kent does not respond to this, explaining instead why he has arrived: ‘I am come / To bid my king and master aye good night. / Is he not here?’ (233–5). Kent’s question

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prompts Albany’s moment of appalled remembering: ‘Great thing of us forgot!’ (235). Stephen Orgel suggests that the line might be a motto for the play as a whole, which begins with Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ and ends with Lear’s five ‘nevers’. Forgetting a great thing makes it a nothing; losing track of time reduces the critical moment to a never. It is in the space of Albany’s failed memory that the dead Edmund’s order to execute the prisoners is carried out.1 As Foakes notes, ‘I have heard members of an audience titter with nervous laughter on this line, perhaps because so much action involving fights and murders has taken place in the two hundred lines since Lear left the stage that indeed his unfinished business has been forgotten.’2 Though the audience may react uncomfortably, that may indicate the extent to which they share Albany’s forgetting. Jay Halio perfectly reasonably excuses Albany: ‘Events before and after the battle have distracted Albany from concern for Lear and Cordelia’.3 But, unlike Albany, the spectators have no such excuse. Yet, if Kent’s line reminds Albany of what has been forgotten, it ‘does not lead to immediate action’.4 Albany asks Edmund ‘where’s the King? And where’s Cordelia?’ (236) but, before he receives an answer, he asks ‘Seest thou this object, Kent?’ (237) as the bodies of Goneril and Regan are brought onstage, itself an extraordinary action, one that, given the sheer difficulty of carrying corpses onto the stage, is largely avoided in early modern drama. How long a pause is there between Albany’s question to Edmund and the one to Kent? Is it simply the interruption of the entry of the corpses, carried, I presume, by at least four extras (two for each body), that prevents his pursuing the answer? And there is time for Kent, Edmund and Albany to respond to this entry before Edmund finally injects a new note of urgency: ‘Quickly send – / Be brief in it – to the castle, for my writ / Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia; / Nay, send in time.’ (242–5). Even this results only in further delay: albany            Run, run, O run. edgar To who, my Lord? Who hath the office? Send Thy token of reprieve.

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edmund Well thought on: take my sword; the captain, Give it the captain. albany       Haste thee for thy life. (245–9)5 Edmund explains his scheme, Albany asks the gods to defend Cordelia, Edmund is probably carried off (though, in the chaos, it does not follow that anyone actually responds to Albany’s order ‘Bear him hence awhile’ [252]), and then Lear enters. I have set out the sequence because the turmoil and chaos on the one hand and the disconnects between speeches on the other create a staging unlike anything Shakespeare had previously aimed at. Questions in drama usually elicit answers but not here. The realization that Edmund has not said to whom to go and that a ‘token of reprieve’ will be needed disrupts, brilliantly, the response to Edmund’s revelation – which is news to everyone else onstage – that Lear and Cordelia face death. But we might also note that Edmund’s earlier conversation with the Captain is carefully opaque: he never explicitly states what the ‘note’ (28) that he hands to the Captain sets out. It is an action that is not for the ‘tender-minded’, something that is ‘great employment’ (32–3), an action that will make the captain ‘able to write “happy” when thou’st done’t’ (36), in the sense of prosperous or fortunate, and which the Captain himself is willing to do, ‘If it be man’s work’ (40). Because critics know the play, they may assume that what Edmund commissions is clear but it is, I suppose, conceivable that audiences might miss the point and hence share the surprise at the news later in the scene. But it is not too demanding to follow where Edmund’s thinking might be taking him and leading the Captain. In the hubbub and multiple converging concerns as the various strands of the vast and fragmented narrative finally come together, the lengthy resolving of the Edmund–Edgar conflict allows for the formalized rituals of challenge and response that eventuate in the fight, all of which takes up time after the exit of Lear and Cordelia at line 26. I emphasize here the procedures of the duel because such language, complete with the repeated trumpet-calls, slow the pace of the action. As Foakes articulates, the fight itself, though marked in the First Folio (F) by a simple stage direction, ‘Alarums.

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Fights.’, may be substantial: ‘there is a stage tradition of making it a strenuous and extended encounter between two strong adversaries, Edgar winning with difficulty’.6 His statement is true, though it can also be almost perfunctory, as in Peter Brook’s 1971 film. All this distracts the audience quite as much as the onstage characters from thinking about Lear. Even if Edgar’s mention of Kent’s ‘piteous tale of Lear and him’ brings Lear’s name back into the text, making it heard again, it may not be enough to remind us to wonder whether the Captain is indeed carrying out offstage whatever it was that Edmund set down in that note. And the entry of ‘one with a bloudie knife’, as the 1608 quarto (Q) puts it (220 SD), only compounds the problem, for, though he is calling for help (too late since the person whose blood stains the knife is, as he knows, already dead), he is unable to identify the victim: ‘It came even from the heart of – O, she’s dead!’ (223). Significantly, in the Q text he breaks off at ‘of’ so that F’s identification of the gender of the dead person is not present. Foakes, again, is helpful on the effect of F’s addition: ‘does everyone at first suppose he means Cordelia?’.7 I doubt ‘everyone’ will but some may well and are therefore wrong-footed in the Gentleman’s answer to Albany’s ‘Who dead? Speak, man.’: ‘Your lady, sir, your lady’ (224–5). Take time to think and probably one would not imagine the captain would have stabbed Cordelia with a knife, so carefully specified in the stage direction and the line and not something that is a soldier’s weapon (it is explicitly a knife rather than, say, a dagger). Only after someone has left with the ‘token of reprieve’ does Edmund finally adumbrate what the note to the captain set out: He hath commission from thy wife and me To hang Cordelia in the prison and To lay the blame upon her own despair, That she fordid herself. (250–3) Nothing earlier has suggested Goneril’s complicity in this, nothing earlier had suggested setting it up as a faked suicide, nor that hanging is to be the mode of death. And Edmund’s elaboration here about Cordelia contrasts with his silence about how Lear was to have been killed.

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I have been setting out the sequence precisely to underline how difficult Shakespeare makes it for the audience to realize that it has forgotten Lear and Cordelia at the same time as making us aware of how complicit we may therefore feel in the belatedness of the new urgency that Edmund’s decision to do ‘Some good … / Despite of mine own nature’ (241–2) creates. The manipulation of the audience through their participation in the forgetting of that ‘Great thing’ not only magnifies the shock of the entry of Lear ‘with Cordelia in his arms’, that death that was, as Dr Johnson pointed out, ‘contrary … to the faith of chronicles’,8 but also implicates the audience in the forgetting in a way that seems to me remarkable and perhaps unprecedented. When critics consider the end of King Lear they can superbly analyse what succeeds the forgetting but not the forgetting itself. So, for instance, Charles Altieri asks the question ‘why … would the play call attention to the forgetting?’ in his article ‘How Can Act 5 Forget Lear and Cordelia?’9 But he moves on to consider the meaning of Lear’s death through a consideration of Wittgenstein on ‘the sense of the world’ and never returns to answer the two questions he has posed.10 My answer has been placed in relation to our own ability, as spectators, to have shared in the forgetting. The alternative is to posit that, if we have been remembering what we might guess is planned for them offstage, we can only be aware of how that magnifies our helplessness, the impossibility of our intervening in the action of which we are compelled to be passive observers. Spectatorship denies us the activity that our remembering might demand of us while it also aligns us with the characters’ own forgetfulness, something that, then, redefines their and our shared humanity in its terrible ability not to be thinking what, subsequently, we come to know we should have been thinking. This is a clearly marked passage of forgetting. But King Lear also includes an absence as forgetting that is much less decisively underlined. When, at the end, Albany instructs the onstage characters (and the audience) ‘O, see, see!’ (303), we look again at Lear who seems in that strange space in which he is so disconnected from those around him. Lear’s first words in this, his last speech are ‘And my poor fool is hanged’ (304). This is the last of the eight occurrences of the verb hang in the play: from the ‘plagues that in the pendulous air / Hang fated o’er men’s faults’ that Lear calls down on his daughters (3.4.67–8) to Regan’s recommendation for

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dealing with the ‘traitor’ Gloucester, ‘Hang him instantly’ (3.7.4), from the samphire-gatherer who ‘Hangs’ ‘Half-way down’ (4.6.14– 15) to Lear’s imagining the ‘usurer hangs the cozener’ (4.6.159), from Cordelia hoping that ‘restoration hang / Thy medicine on my lips’ (4.6.26–7) to the two earlier uses in the last scene (Edmund’s commission to ‘hang Cordelia’ and Lear’s killing ‘the slave that was a-hanging thee’ [5.3.251, 272]). I turn again to Foakes’s superb commentary: [A] term of endearment, referring to Cordelia, who has been hanged; but also recalling Lear’s other favourite, the Fool, not heard of since he left the stage at the end of 3.6. The double reference, making us suppose the Fool dead too, gives a special poignancy to these six short words, which penetrate to the very heart of loss.11 I am not concerned, any more than Foakes is, with the proposal that Fool and Cordelia were doubled, something I find very unlikely indeed. But the line cannot not make us think of the Fool. As Stephen Booth puts it, The context that dictates the fool refers to Cordelia – Lear’s position over her body, the pronoun thou, her death by hanging, and the echo of two earlier cycles of grief and hope – coexists with the context provided by the play in which one character is a fool, a professional clown, who has vanished noiselessly during Act III, and by a scene punctuated with six reports of offstage deaths.12 What interests me is the Fool’s absence, his having vanished, perhaps ‘noiselessly’. The Fool’s last words in F are a response to Lear’s ‘we’ll go to supper i’the morning’: ‘And I’ll go to bed at noon.’ (3.7.81–3). In Q, a few lines after Lear’s paradoxical statement, Kent orders the Fool to ‘help to bear thy master; / Thou must not stay behind’ (98–9) and the Fool leaves, never to reappear. Recent productions have found that too open an effect. I will let them speak of their need to find an explanation, a closure, a performed finality (or a rejection of finality) that denies the quietness of the event in the early texts. I will do so at some length, not least because their rationale is premised on a rejection of forgetting, a

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refusal to allow the Fool’s last moments onstage to create a gulf that the audience may be completely unaware of until Lear says ‘my poor fool is hanged’, so that that comment may make them suddenly aware that the Fool has been offstage since 3.6, that we have not remembered that he has been forgotten, that we have shared in the text’s occlusion of his presence. When a character leaves a scene alive, the audience cannot know whether he or she will return or whether this is the last time they will see the character. When they die, the finality of their double exit (carried offstage and out of life) is absolute. In Adrian Noble’s 1982 RSC production, the Fool (Antony Sher), for many the most extraordinary and memorable performance in the show, did not let his final stage moment be a mysterious and unmarked exit. This Fool was accidentally ‘stabbed in a dustbin by the mad Lear [Michael Gambon], continually destructive of his own good’,13 as he raged against his daughters. It was not an intentional act but a by-product of the anger. ‘Dying, he hung out of the barrel, a grotesque jack-in-the-box. Edgar embraced him during his last soliloquy, then pushed him down into the barrel, covered it with a blanket and gave it a final pat as he left.’14 Sher, in his account of playing the role, wrote of ‘the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of the Fool from the play’: ‘Shakespeare suddenly has him disappear … without any explanation or reference.’ Sher notes that the theory of the Fool/Cordelia double could mean that ‘the author … simply didn’t have time or inventive energy to write an “exit” for the Fool. So what may just have been a careless oversight in the original production has been handed down to us as a frustrating enigma’.15 Adrian Noble and Sher ‘were determined to try and offer the audience some kind of explanation for the disappearance and we discussed ways in which the Fool might remain behind in the hovel, exhausted and despairing’, something another production would explore (see below). Then a rehearsal moment of exploring how to ‘anatomize Regan’ led to the Fool holding a pillow as the daughter and, as they worked to ‘release the lunacy, panic, and desperation all the characters are experiencing’, Gambon ‘attacked the pillow with his knife, hacking and stabbing. Afterwards we cautiously discussed the possibility of Lear stabbing through the pillow and thus accidentally killing the Fool’. They saw that the Fool’s ‘enigmatic last line’, ‘I’ll go to bed at noon’, would ‘make perfect sense coming from a mortally wounded man, and

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the other characters simply failed to notice what has happened to him, their concentration being fixed entirely on Lear’s collapse’: ‘We had accidentally stumbled upon a valid and, I believe, uncontrived explanation for the Fool’s disappearance’.16 Significantly, the play’s lack of what is construed as a proper exit is put down to Shakespeare’s ‘careless oversight’, a moment of authorial forgetting in the busy-ness of creating the play. The resultant action was not initially an intention but rather a by-product of the energy of the rehearsal discovery, something that is then rationalized for its compatibility with the dialogue. The need not to let the Fool be forgotten leads to a receptiveness to anything that might create explanation, justify finality, refuse the inexplicable or the unnoticed. Something similar to Sher’s and Noble’s discovery happened in the rehearsal process for Sam Mendes’s 2014 production at the National Theatre. Mendes, according to Adrian Scarborough who played Fool, ‘hates loose ends … He felt there had to be a purpose in his leaving.’17 As Simon Russell Beale, who played King Lear, commented: Famously of course the Fool disappears … partly because of course Lear has lost his mind and therefore the Fool has no function … Sam said ‘what if Lear kills him himself?’ … almost as a sign that his mind has completely gone. So that is what I do: I beat him to death.18 Mendes’s own explanation connected the decision more with a view of Lear than with an approach to the enigma of the Fool’s exit: When Lear goes mad his only means of communication is violence. He uses the language of violence throughout the play, and the currency of the society he governs is violence. So for him in his madness to … club the Fool to death with an iron bar is because his means of communication is non-verbal.19 In 1990 at the National Theatre, Deborah Warner found a different solution, letting the Fool ‘suffer a quiet death rather than simply vanish’:20 The storm had exhausted [David Bradley’s Fool] and he was left dying, stretched out on the floor, shivering uncontrollably, by the

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end of the scene, his weak attempts to get up to follow Lear useless. The interval, taken at this point, left the audience with the sight of Fool’s corpse alone on stage.21 Trevor Nunn’s 2007 RSC production avoided either of these solutions, murder or hypothermia, but, again as the last moments before the interval, had the Fool hanged, making the double referent for Lear’s later statement clear, here a callous act of brutality by soldiers. Germaine Greer was not pleased: Most irritating is an interpolated scene in which the spoonplaying Fool is hanged on stage … To choruses of grunts and snarls from the Ruritanian cavalry, the Fool’s harness is hooked up, and he is gently hoisted aloft, arms and legs feebly jerking as if to suggest that his neck had been broken. Like the rain on the stage, the fake hanging was better left out.22 Tim Pigott-Smith objected too, not on purist grounds but because of the damage this invention caused by its proximity to the blinding of Gloucester: ‘That was a daft thing to do. There’s the one scene of insane violence, and before it you put another scene of violence, in which nobody speaks. It … completely undermined the power of the blinding.’23 I record these negative views because their objection is to an intrusion into the text which, strikingly, is not connected to the virtues and possibilities of the early text’s creation of a space for future forgetting. Such solutions – stabbing, freezing and hanging – make the Fool’s absence an unwilled act, explaining the moment and making it visible and unalterable. But there are two other possible routes, one far more common than the other. The former is that Fool simply disappears out of the play, that, as Wells puts it, in his Q-based edition, Shakespeare ‘allowed the external critic and representative of Lear’s folly to fade quietly from the play as madness finally takes charge of Lear’s mind’.24 Unmarked or perhaps undermarked as a final exit, especially in Q without F’s last line for him, this would leave the audience unsure whether he will reappear or, a little more strongly, the audience unaware that there is a question mark over his reappearance. After all, after Lear leaves the stage in 3.7, it will be four hundred or five hundred lines (in F and Q respectively) before he enters again and no one for a moment thinks Lear has

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gone for good. Adrian Scarborough, Mendes’s Fool, was intrigued by what he saw as Shakespeare’s careful preparation for this exit: ‘He becomes mute really. Throughout the course of the final two scenes he is given less and less to say and in the end he has no purpose in the rest of the play.’25 From fairly early in analysis of the play, some editors and critics have seen ‘I’ll go to bed at noon’ less as a fading out than as a statement of an intended action, that the Fool is choosing to leave the play. As Capell put it in 1779: ‘This facetious speech of the Fool is meant as a preparation for losing him; for ’tis towards “noon” with the play (that is, towards the middle of it) when he takes leave of us in that speech.’26 In 1863 Cowden Clarke saw it as a sign of the Fool’s own impending death: ‘a dismissal of himself from the scene of the tragedy and from his own short day of life’, for the Fool, who has ‘much pined away’ since Cordelia’s departure for France (1.4.72), ‘has gone to his eternal rest even in the very “noon” of his existence’.27 Along such a track, the Fool is ‘warning the audience that he can no longer follow the failing King’ and his last speech expresses [his] determination to leave King Lear with its course half run. The Fool sees the lineaments of Lear’s tragedy only too well. And he sees that he can do nothing to help his master, now far beyond the reach of a jest. So he resolves to call it a day at ‘noon’, to abandon the action at its mid-point, to absent himself from half the story.28 Scarborough, while understanding Mendes’s choice, envisaged another version compatible with this. Picking up on the Fool’s earlier comment, ‘Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill lest it break thy neck with following it; but the great one that goes upward, let him draw thee after’ (2.2.267–70), Scarborough sees this as a potential turning point: ‘He makes a decision at that point to start looking about for other employment.’29 Fool’s silent response to Kent’s order to help with Lear would then be an act of rejection and Scarborough would have liked to play it ‘as the moment where he goes “Nah. I’m outta here. I’m gone. I’d like to go now. Enough is enough”’.30 Less concerned about finding his future paymaster, Ian Hughes’s Fool, in Adrian Noble’s second production of the play for the RSC (1993), recognized that ‘Stephens’s Lear became increasingly trapped in a world of his own making’ and he could not help, ‘making his final exit in 3.6 in the wrong direction, away from Kent

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and Lear, in a state of suicidal despair, carrying a knife which Lear had dropped’.31 However deliberate it may be, the exit, unless there is none and the Fool is left as a corpse onstage, cannot guarantee that the character will not return. One of the aspects of dramaturgy that is too often ignored is precisely that the audience cannot know whether a character will re-enter and might speak again. Some productions, indeed, have refused to let the Fool leave. Andy Serkis in Max Stafford-Clark’s 1993 Royal Court version, ‘obstinately refus[ed] to vanish after 3.7, graffiti-spraying on the back wall “What a piece of”, leaving open the question whether the quotation is to end “rubbish” or “work is man”.’32 Most memorably, at the end of Grigori Kozintsev’s film Korol Lir, Oleg Dal, the emaciated, shavenheaded Fool Kozinstev called ‘the Auschwitz boy’, sat playing his pipe and was kicked out of the way by the soldiers carrying off the corpses of Lear and Cordelia, the sound of the pipe (actually a clarinet in Shostakovich’s scoring), as ‘the still voice of suffering’, its reappearance a reminder that ‘Life – a none too easy one – goes on.’33 Neither the fading away nor the deliberate rejection of continuing to participate in the plot can, in itself, inform the audience that this exit is final. And without that finality the audience forgets that the character is no longer there, cannot mark his/her absence until reminded by a line as simple as ‘And my poor fool is hanged’ half a play later, when the play has moved from its noon to what will eventually, though long-delayed, prove to be its ‘promised end’ (5.3.261). What in King Lear begins as unmarked absence becomes, in the play’s stage history, an explanation with variations. Something similar happened with responses to the disappearance of Adam midway through As You Like It who ‘suddenly vanishes from the play without even the excuse of a pursuing bear’.34 In 2.7, when the hungry and threatening Orlando has been welcomed by the hospitable Duke Senior, Orlando leaves to bring in Adam who is ‘Oppressed with two weak evils, age and hunger’ (2.7.133) and, after Jaques’s seven ages of man set-piece has filled the interim, he returns carrying Adam, who is so exhausted he ‘scarce can speak to thank you for myself’ (171), placing him somewhere between Jaques’s sixth age when the voice ‘pipes / And whistles in his sound’ (163–4) and the threat of the ‘mere oblivion’ of the seventh age. Dowden read the effect

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of the juxtaposition differently: as Bullough describes Dowden’s argument, ‘the cynical Jaques … has barely finished speaking of the decrepitude and negations of old age when Adam comes in and “is found to be not second childishness, but fidelity, loyalty, and longenduring affection”’.35 Nonetheless, the play emphasizes Adam’s age as ‘almost fourscore’ (2.3.71), though still ‘strong and lusty’ because ‘in my youth I never did apply / Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood’ (47–9).36 By the end of 2.7, after Amiens’s song of winter which covers the time needed for Orlando to explain his parentage and circumstances to Duke Senior, Duke Senior turns to Adam, ‘Good old man, / Thou are right welcome as thy master is’, and orders his Lords to ‘Support him by the arm’ (201–3). Adam is part of the scene’s general exeunt and never reappears nor is spoken of again. As Juliet Dusinberre comments, he ‘disappears here from the play’.37 Dusinberre suggests that the vanishing was ‘perhaps because he was required for another role’ but her suggestion of a doubling with Hymen does not make that in any way pressing enough for Adam to disappear at this point. She also notes that Hymen ‘is often doubled in the modern theatre with Corin’.38 And that suggests to me a much more likely and significant double for the Adam-actor in early modern performance: doubling with Corin. Adam is onstage in 2.3, leaving with Orlando at the scene’s end. There are sixteen lines of dialogue between Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone at the start of 2.4 before Corin appears with Silvius, not a long gap in which to switch costumes but long enough. Neither Corin nor Adam are in 2.5, after which Adam is on for 2.6, coming on again in 2.7. After 2.7 there is a brief scene (3.1) for Duke Frederick, Oliver and Lords, ample time for Adam to switch to Corin, the last change of costume unless and until the actor plays Hymen in the last scene. There is emphasis from the first moments of his time onstage that Corin is old, at least in Silvius’s eyes: ‘being old, thou canst not guess, / Though in thy youth thou wast as true a lover / As ever sighed upon a midnight pillow.’ (2.4.22–4). In other words, the Adam/Corin double aligns the two old men, and, after the initial changes, leaves the actor as Corin for all his scenes after 2.7. Even more than the two Dukes, each of Adam and Corin belongs in one of the play’s two worlds, Adam in the court world where he has worked all his life and Corin in Arden which, for all the problems of his master with his ‘churlish disposition’ (2.4.80),

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makes sense to him in the way that the court does not: ‘Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court’ (3.2.43–6). Adam makes the (temporary?) move to Arden, along with Orlando and Oliver, Rosalind and Celia, Touchstone and Duke Senior (and his ‘co-mates and brothers in exile’, 2.1.1) but Corin will never leave it for court. An actor who can play Adam can probably play Corin with ease and vice versa (even if Adams tend onstage to be small and Corins fairly large, for some reason). This is, in other words, a manageable and possibly ‘speaking’ double, a double that draws attention to itself as a double so that watching Corin reminds us of Adam through the presence of the actor’s body. Adam and Corin also share something of the forgetfulness of age. Jaques’s identification of the seventh age as one of ‘mere oblivion’, a ‘second childishness’ with the added characteristic of being nothing more than forgetfulness, of the emptiness of that state of oblivion which sensory decay creates (‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste’ [2.7.166–7]), may be brutal but Corin’s first conversation marks his forgetfulness: silvius How many actions most ridiculous Hast thou been drawn to by thy fantasy? corin Into a thousand that I have forgotten. silvius O, thou didst then never love so heartily. If thou rememb’rest not the slightest folly That ever love did make thee run into, Thou hast not loved. (2.4.27–33) We do not hear Silvius’s accusation as justified: Corin may well have loved but forgotten his ‘actions most ridiculous’ – the young cannot believe that the old could ever have loved as they do. But the play is intrigued by certain things that cannot be forgotten. Rosalind begins the play concerned about the consequences of her inability to forget: she cannot be happy, for, unless Celia ‘could teach me to forget a banished father, you must not learn me how to remember any extraordinary pleasure’, even though she is soon prepared to

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‘forget the condition of my estate to rejoice in yours’ (1.2.5–7, 15–16). At the other end of the play, as the news of Duke Senior’s return to power is heard, he suggests a momentary forgetfulness, even as he anticipates a hierarchically careful pro rata distribution of rewards:          … every of this happy number That have endured shrewd days and nights with us, Shall share the good of our returned fortune, According to the measure of their states. Meantime, forget this new-fall’n dignity, And fall into our rustic revelry. (5.4.170–5) When the court returns from Arden to its rightful location, Duke Senior wants to reassure his co-mates that there will be no trace of what Amiens sang of in Adam’s last scene: ‘Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, / That dost not bite so nigh / As benefits forgot’ (2.7.185– 7). There will presumably be no trace of the freezing weather in the warm world of the court either. But none of this quite explains the silence of Adam’s disappearance and, as with Lear’s Fool, there has been a recent tendency to present an explanation. At the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1986, the first Arden scenes were all full of wind and cold, with snow falling as Rosalind and company reached the forest. So Duke Senior’s banquet was ‘bleak and wintry, climaxing with the death of old Adam’.39 Hence, Robert Smallwood wrongly thought that the same choice in Stephen Pimlott’s 1996 RSC production was ‘possibly a theatrical first’. But at Stratford, the mode of Adam’s death became a disturbing sign of courtly behaviour: Adam lay at the end of the ducal table wrapped in blankets and with attentive forest lords trying in vain to feed him. The Duke walked across to him at the end of the scene, remarked cheerily ‘Support him by the arm’, and escorted Orlando (unaware of his servant’s condition) from the stage. Whether the remark derived from myopia or from the Duke’s habitual sense of indifference to the lower orders it was impossible to say, but either way the rest of us could see perfectly well that the old man was well past support of any kind. As the Duke and Orlando strode off arm

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in arm Adam breathed his last and the first half of the comedy ended (generically a little dubiously) with his death. It was a solemn, surprising, and above all directorial interval effect.40 After the interval spring had sprung there was ‘a tumulus at the back of the stage with a few flowers [daffodils] sprouting from it – presumably Adam’s resting place’.41 Audiences certainly did presume that but it was not quite Pimlott’s intention; for him the mound was simply a sign that the forest ‘was a holy place, an ancient place of ritual where a god might come or, indeed, death’.42 Jackson wondered whether the mound was ‘a symbolic burial of the biblical Old Adam, a sign of the forest’s quasireligious powers of regeneration, or just a convenient bank for love to lie upon’.43 Juliet Dusinberre saw it unequivocally as ‘a grave with flowers, evocative of Poussin’s painting Les Bergers d’Arcadie (1638–40), in which rustics in a forest come across a tomb inscribed “Et in Arcadia sum” (“I [death] also am present in Arcadia”)’.44 There is, of course, a shift of seasons in As You Like It and the onstage winter of the first Arden scenes regularly gives way in performance to warmer weather which justifies, in one way, the pages’ song about ‘spring-time’, for ‘Sweet lovers love the spring’ (5.3.19, 21). Does Adam therefore in some sense belong to winter, to the world that must give way to the different Arden of the rest of the play? Does he need to be forgotten by us or is he simply forgotten by Shakespeare? Certainly there is something strikingly odd about the way his name is present in the play. Shakespeare found the character and his name in his main source, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde where he is Adam Spencer, his surname defining his profession for the word means ‘steward’. But Shakespeare leans on the name, having it spoken by Orlando six times, three in the first twenty-five lines of the play (and then in 2.3 and 2.6). This seems to me an unusual frequency for a comparatively minor figure, as if the name is doing more work than simply identifying a character. Naming a character is of course essential for an audience. If a name is not spoken, the character has no name. In productions with heavy doubling, naming is all the more helpful. But Shakespeare is usually more economical than he is with Adam. In As You Like It, for instance, Amiens is named only once, a scene he is in so that the naming by a Lord can be accompanied by a gesture and response, ‘Today my lord of

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Amiens and myself … ’ (2.1.29). Corin is named twice by Silvius in his first scene (2.4.20, 22), while Silvius is named seven times, six by Phoebe in their first scene together, all after Phoebe has fallen for Rosalind so that the repetition seems a deliberate choice on her part to manipulate Silvius; up to that point Silvius has been unnamed so that Corin invites Rosalind and Celia to see ‘the shepherd that complained of love’, not ‘Silvius that complained of love’ (3.4.45). Touchstone is named three times, once by Rosalind in 2.4 and twice by Corin in 3.2. I will focus on the un-naming of Oliver in a later chapter (see pp. 189–90). Perhaps it is the one use of ‘Adam’ that is not a reference to the character that helps: ‘Here feel we not the penalty of Adam’, says Duke Senior in praising life in Arden (2.1.5). Armstrong argued in Shakespeare’s Imagination that the play is unusually full of religious references where neither Lodge’s romance nor Greene’s Orlando Furioso is. The play’s opening words, ‘As I remember, Adam’, together with some similarity apparently perceived between certain biblical features such as the Garden of Eden and the setting of Lodge’s [Rosalynde] initiated a series of memory associations which constituted an undercurrent of religious reminiscence manifesting itself in the imagery of the play from beginning to end. The poet keeps ‘remembering Adam’ again.45 If the point here, extensively set out by Armstrong, is a clustering of religious resonances that are not generated by conscious acts of association, ‘it is improbable that Shakespeare realized the extent to which he was continually “remembering Adam”’ in the play.46 So the trigger, for Armstrong, is simply the character name accidentally inherited from the source. There is, as it were, no concern on Shakespeare’s part to link the old servant Adam to ‘the penalty of Adam’ but the former is ultimately responsible for the latter. Few productions are much interested in Adam but Nicholas Hytner at the Manchester Royal Exchange in 1986 made Adam ‘not an anomalously emblematic figure but a realistic cousin of Chekhov’s [Firs], who mourned a social change as poignant as the felling of the cherry orchard, and shook with loyal amazement when, at the end of 2.7, he realized that it was his monarch who was embracing him’.47 I am far from convinced by Armstrong’s argument but would rather see the play as complexly engaged with a courtly notion of

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Arden as a pre-lapsarian paradise set against the economic hardship of landlords and employees as Corin describes it. Arden, Ardennes and Eden coalesce, along with a romance world from where characters like Corin, Silvius and Phoebe acquire their names. The play’s Adam can be forgotten as the play extends the stratified ramifications of a space from which the first Adam was expelled, unlike the play’s Adam who chooses to move in the other direction. And, crucially, unless the production chooses to remind us or to explain why Adam exits the play, the ways in which Shakespeare remembered Adam outweigh the realization of our forgetting him. Though we do not see Adam again after 2.7, we do more than lose sight of him. We also lose memory of him. He is forgotten by the play and therefore by the audience who may, in a modern production, only recall his presence if the actor comes on for the curtain-call – and it is a rule of Equity that an actor who appears only in the first half of a production need not stay for the final curtain, choosing usually to head home early if the placing of the interval permits the invocation of the union rule. What one text forgets, another can remember. At the end of Romeo and Juliet, Montague arrives in the Capulet monument to be punningly told by the Prince, in a rather savage moment of wordplay, ‘thou art early up / To see thy son and heir thus early down.’ (5.3.208–9). Montague has entered alone, though editors have usually added servants or attendants. Most significantly the expected gathering of the four parents, the Montagues and Capulets, is unbalanced: Alas, my liege, my wife is dead tonight; Grief of my son’s exile hath stopped her breath. (210–11) As René Weis notes, ‘What would have been a perfect cross-play echo, the parental quartet who earlier (1.1) confronted each other now symmetrically grieving for their children, becomes a somewhat unbalanced scene marked, perhaps, by theatrical expediency.’48 The abrupt announcement is usually explained as a consequence of the need for the actor to double, though editors have never made much sense of what the double is likely to have been, none of the suggestions providing a reason for Lady Montague’s absence, only of what the actor might have done later in the play, given that his

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main role had ended. It is rare for texts to point in such a way to the theatrical consequence of the combination of a limited size of company and a large number of roles. Perhaps, instead, we should see the imbalance as part of the point, an awareness that grief can kill in the older generation too. Shakespeare’s principal source, Arthurs Brooke’s poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), makes no mention of her death. In the 1597 quarto (Q1), Montague’s second line, outlining the cause of his wife’s death, is not present. Instead he tells the Prince – and the audience – ‘And yong Benuol[i]o is deceased too’ (sig. K3r). Presumably someone remembered he was not there and thought he should be remembered as conveniently dead. Here the solution to the absence of Benvolio from the second half of the play is to kill him off, like the occasional onstage deaths of Lear’s Fool or Adam. Whatever the source of Q1 – and discussions of it as touring version, reported or pirated continue unsettled – someone, be it Shakespeare, Chettle or a member of a theatre company, perceived a loose end that needed tying as neatly as practicable. I see Shakespeare as the least likely candidate but one never knows. In Q1, as Alan Dessen notes, ‘the wiping out of the younger generation is complete’49 – a terrifyingly absolute catastrophe. If, as editors tend to believe, on little warrant, the Benvolio actor was also needed in this scene in some performance or other, then the parallel with a doubling for the boy playing the now dead Lady Montague seemed reasonable. But, much more like Adam than even the Fool, Benvolio’s absence has been seen simply as something that happens, a character we may not ever know we have forgotten. I cannot recall or locate any production that has played the Q1 line about his death in an otherwise conventionally Q2-based production. Benvolio usually just seems to have wandered out of the play. Yet surely there is more to it than that. As Anne Barton explores, Shakespeare has deliberately gone beyond Brooke by giving a carefully chosen name to the unnamed close friend of Brooke’s Romeus. Benvolio, the one who wishes well, balances the Malvolio Shakespeare would create a few years later in Twelfth Night. And Benvolio is the only major character in Romeo and Juliet who possesses a truly defining name: one that can be seen to govern his nature and behavior. In every scene in which he appears, Benvolio

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functions as the voice of common sense …. He, much more than Mercutio, or even the Nurse, is the relaxed and genial spokesman for comedy in the play.50 In 3.1, that mid-point moment that changes the play’s direction so absolutely, a scene that in carefully designed ways echoes the street scene that opened the play, Benvolio makes his last appearance. Having, as in the first scene, failed to prevent a street brawl, this time by failing to reason effectively with Mercutio and, later, Tybalt over the dangers of fighting, Benvolio leaves the stage with the wounded Mercutio and returns to announce his death, see Romeo kill Tybalt and then have to provide a measured account of the violence, a not entirely neutral report, though how different it is from what occurs onstage varies from production to production. ‘That is the end of Benvolio’s part in the play. A major character for almost half of it, he vanishes without explanation …, never to reappear.’51 Barton sees the significance of his exit: Benvolio’s departure, so puzzling in literal, plot terms, signals to us simultaneously from another level. When this character mysteriously melts away from Romeo’s side, comedy leaves the play with him. The centre of gravity shifts abruptly towards tragedy, in ways that Friar Laurence alone will be powerless to redress.52 The friar and the friend share the same wish and the same failure; just as Friar Laurence’s first entry is held back until 2.3 after which he becomes a major figure, so Benvolio will leave in 3.1, as Mercutio’s and Tybalt’s deaths remove them from the plot. The balancing is a reverse but each is equally unsuccessful. Laurence’s name has no signifying meaning; Benvolio’s strongly does but the play has moved beyond the point at which anyone’s well-wishing can have any influence to prevent the tragedy. Letters go astray, thanks to plague, Romeo’s page quite reasonably misunderstands Juliet’s funeral, and another innocent, Paris, gets caught up in the general slaughter of the young. Quite how an audience can become aware that there is no point in being a well-wisher any more depends on whether we notice that Benvolio is no longer around, whether we notice that we have forgotten him. There may be something to be said for Q1’s solution,

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but Q2’s silence is all the more absolute in its awareness that good intentions are now pointless and absent. Of course with the Crummles company in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, at least in David Edgar’s version of the novel for the RSC, anything is possible. In Edgar’s brilliant and very funny ending for Part 1 of his adaptation, the Crummles troupe perform a Romeo with a surprisingly all-inclusive happy ending in pastiche blank verse interspersed with couplets: the poison Romeo took turns out simply to have caused a temporary drowsiness; Paris was ‘Not dead so much as stunned’;53 Mercutio          … though thought dead … My friend Benvolio observed a breath Of slight proportion on my countenance And I was taken to a nearby town, Where I was cured by surgeons of renown. (206) Other less predictable figures arrive, including Rosaline, Lady Montague, Romeo’s ‘little sister’ (played by ‘The Infant Phenomenon’) and the Apothecary who, Balthazar explains, had prepared ‘not poison, but / An harmless cordial, of sharp effect / But of no lasting peril’ (204, 207). Tybalt stays dead, with Lady Capulet announcing ‘Let Tybalt lie there. / And to a merry dance let us repair.’ (208). Benvolio arrived with Mercutio and has more news, telling his tale about how his friends thought him ‘almost feminine in countenance / With not a hair of manhood on my chin’ but ‘now deception’s o’er’: benvolio  reaches up, takes off his cap, and lets fall her long hair. From nature let deceit no more disbar: Benvolio become Benvolia! Which elicits the shared response ‘Ah me. Ah? You?’ (206) and also adds a level of complexity that aligns the happy ending of this Romeo and Juliet with the cross-dressing of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night and As You Like It. I rather hope that James Howard’s lost version performed in the 1660s might have hit on something as deliciously irrelevant as this:

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This Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, was made some time after into a Tragi-comedy, by Mr. James Howard, he preserving Romeo and Juliet alive; so that when the Tragedy was Reviv’d again, ’twas Play’d Alternately, Tragical one Day, and Tragicomical another; for several Days together.54 Edgar’s recoveries and transformations allow a return for a character who has never reappeared in any other version of Romeo I have encountered. Benvolio otherwise always stays forgotten. We cannot know, when he leaves in 3.1, that he will not return and we almost certainly never think about what happened to him by the time late on when we may perhaps remember that we have lost sight of him. My final example is a character whom the play seems to forget but whom we might remember or be made to remember: Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale. Here, the parallel is closer to forgetting about Lear and Cordelia, the example with which I began this chapter, but there is nothing of comparable urgency. It is quite simply that, at the end of the play, amid all the joy that she who was lost, Perdita, has been found, that the king (and the kingdom) has an heir again, that Hermione is alive – and amid all the oddities of Hermione’s embracing Leontes and hanging ‘about his neck’ but saying nothing to him, of Leontes’s arranging a marriage for Paulina and Camillo who have never said a word to each other in the entire play and of Leontes’s firm statement about Hermione that ‘I saw her, / As I thought, dead’ (5.3.139–40) – amid all of this no one even glancingly mentions the dead prince. Shakespeare has earlier placed, as beautifully as possible, the news of his sickening: leontes How does the boy? servant        He took good rest to-night; ’tis hoped His sickness is discharged. leontes          To see his nobleness Conceiving the dishonour of his mother! He straight declined, drooped, took it deeply, Fastened and fixed the shame on’t in himself, Threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep,

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And downright languished. Leave me solely. Go, See how he fares. (2.3.10–17) And then, in the trial scene, a servant – the same one? – entering at speed, immediately after Leontes has pronounced ‘There is no truth at all i’th’ oracle / The sessions shall proceed – this is mere falsehood’, with the news ‘The prince your son, with mere conceit and fear / Of the queen’s speed, is gone.’ ‘How, “gone”?’ ‘Is dead.’ (3.2.137–42). At the scene’s end, Leontes leaves with Paulina to go ‘To the dead bodies of my queen and son’ (232). The play is hugely concerned with one of the bodies but has nothing whatsoever more to say of the other at this point. Only briefly, when news comes of Florizel’s arrival in Sicilia ‘with his princess’ (Perdita, of course), does Paulina remind us of the close parallel between Florizel and Mamillius:    Had our prince, Jewel of children, seen this hour, he had paired Well with this lord; there was not a full month Between their births. (5.1.115–18) And Leontes’s pain reappears:   Prithee no more; cease. Thou know’st He dies to me again when talked of. Sure, When I shall see this gentleman thy speeches Will bring me to consider that which may Unfurnish me of reason. (118–22) But, whatever extremes of emotion Leontes has yet to go through in the play, madness is not one of them. When Florizel and Perdita enter, Leontes compares them to his losses:    O, alas, I lost a couple that ’twixt heaven and earth Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as You, gracious couple, do … (130–3)

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The lost couple is Hermione and Mamillius, reflected in Perdita and Florizel and, in this play with so many doubles, Perdita becomes her mother as Florizel conjures up the dead child. In Nicholas Hytner’s production at the National Theatre in 2001, large portraits of Hermione and Mamillius were prominent features of the set for the scene, making the lost pair strongly visible. Leontes, looking at Florizel and Perdita, wonders, with a remarkably self-centred focus,             What might I have been, Might I a son and daughter now have looked on, Such goodly things as you? (175–7) If the Hermione/Perdita link, the first of these pairings, splits apart but is to be recreated (just as the identity of Florizel’s bride metamorphoses from the unconvincing lie of her being the daughter of Smalus the Libyan to being, eventually, found as Leontes’s daughter), there will be nothing comparable for the other pair. Florizel/Mamillius is a mirroring not able to be refound and the last scene will not refer to the lost son. There is no ambiguity about Mamillius’s not being present, only an ambiguity about the steadfast refusal in the ending to mention his absence. Stephen Orgel links it to the absence of Antigonus: ‘Mamillius … and Antigonus … are forgotten among the general wonder and rejoicing – no statue of Mamillius comes to life; Antigonus does not reappear in a bear skin. Losses are restored by forgetting about them.’55 I am not convinced that the cases are equal. Of course Antigonus does not reappear, though the phonic echo in the name Autolycus seems to continue a kind of presence for him. In the conversation of the Gentlemen about offstage events, one asks ‘What, pray you, became of Antigonus, that carried hence the child?’ and the answer, so deliberately echoing the play’s title, comes pat: ‘Like an old tale still, which will have matter to rehearse, though credit be asleep and not an ear open. He was torn to pieces with a bear … ’ (5.2.60–4). And, in the penultimate speech of the play, as Paulina encourages the ‘precious winners all’, she recalls Antigonus for us again: I, an old turtle, Will wing me to some withered bough, and there

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My mate, that’s never to be found again, Lament, till I am lost. (5.3.132–5) Leontes’s pairing of Paulina with Camillo, whatever we make of that action, given the two say not a word to each other now or earlier, marks that Antigonus needs to be replaced. Mamillius stays, at this late stage, unmentioned. Mahood, in her gently brilliant way in one of the finest books ever written on Shakespeare’s characters, found compensation for Mamillius’s absence in the possibility of early modern doubling practice, again something that is seen as underpinning these acts of exiting: ‘The audience … must have grieved, as we still do, at the death of the child Mamillius … Today’s spectators cannot, however, share the alleviation of grief which would have come to the play’s first audience when they realized that the same boy actor had returned in the part of Perdita’, adding in a note that ‘Trilby Jones beautifully played both parts in the English Shakespeare Company’s 1990 production.’56 Emily Bruni played the same double in Gregory Doran’s 1999 RSC version, turning from the haemophiliac, fragile tsarevich into his sister. The double may alleviate grief but it may also remind us of what has been lost, that the actor will never again appear as Mamillius but only now as Perdita. Does the actor’s body continue to make Mamillius present? Or does the play’s silence about the dead son work to rub out our memory of the other person who had been inscribed onto that body? In Edward Hall’s 2005 production for Propeller, an all-male company, Tam Williams went from ‘boyhood’s pyjamas to a lovely floral frock’, as a reviewer put it,57 but, Carol Rutter eloquently shows, there was no ‘wonder’ in the replacement, no artfulness in the representation, and no metamorphosis. Williams, in a dress, made no attempt to conceal his masculinity. His Perdita never erased Mamillius, rather, harrowingly, showed the brother beneath, the lost in the found, refused permission for the dead child to be restored in the living sister – or forgotten.58 And, of course, while Mamillius/Perdita is the natural early modern double, modern productions have taken other routes: Judi

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Dench, in Trevor Nunn’s 1969 RSC production, doubled Hermione and Perdita (with a substitute Perdita in the final scene), as Mary Anderson had in 1887 and Penny Downie would for Terry Hands at the RSC in 1987; Kathryn Hunter in Theatre de Complicite’s 1992 production who was surely the first person ever to play Mamillius, Paulina, Time and the Old Shepherd in the same production … displayed extraordinary virtuosity, allowing the roles to move between the pain of the innocent child, the love of the woman and the comedy of the old man, each with its own value, none simply grist to her own brilliance. Adults playing children usually draw attention to their discrepancy; Hunter as Mamillius was straightforwardly credible and very moving in his/her innocence.59 Over and over again, the play encourages pairings: Florizel/ Mamillius, Leontes/Mamillius (‘I am like you, they say’ [1.2.208]), Perdita/Leontes, Florizel/Polixenes, Polixenes/Leontes (in the former’s rage at Florizel and Perdita), Perdita/Hermione and, as Carol Rutter wonderfully explores, Hermione ‘performing her own body double in front of the child who’s her double’.60 Mamillius has, more than once, doubled or been connected with the Bear: playing with a wind-up toy bear at the start (Goodman Theatre, 1990), anticipating the bear’s arrival by standing over the abandoned Perdita ‘before exiting the world’, or even a ‘dead Mamillius, holding a teddy bear, who savaged Antigonus’.61 But Mamillius can also play Time, as in Edward Hall’s Propeller production, where ‘the depopulated court of Leontes stood frozen as the boy passed among them, whitening beards, making “stale / The glistering of this present” even as he promised a new world of “freshest things”’.62 Rutter’s argument is about the play as an exploration of the child, childhood, childishness, child’s play, something productions have seen through the eyes of a child, often opening with a child (Mamillius playing outdoors with the grown-ups or with the action set at his birthday party or in the palace nursery) and then leaving the child lost. But what happens if a production refuses to allow us to have forgotten Mamillius? At the end of Edward Hall’s production (Propeller, 2005), Leontes was left onstage with Perdita who ‘took off her dress’ so that, with the pyjamas once again visible, the actor turned back into Mamillius, ‘the son who is conspicuous

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by his absence in this reunion’;63 the boy ‘stared at his father “with accruing incredulity” – then blew out the candle. Blackout. End of story.’64 Tam Williams’s double was able, through the layering of the costume on the actor’s body, to make us see both Perdita and Mamillius, to be unable to forget the lost son, even as the audience saw the lost daughter. Talking of his 1999 production with the Maly Dramatic Theatre of St Petersburg, Declan Donnellan emphasized the importance of Mamillius in his view of the play: There is a problem with all generations: we never show enough respect to the young. The most important character for me in The Winter’s Tale is Mamillius – I mean, they kill the little boy! Hermione and Leontes working out their destinies are far less important. They kill the little boy between them, and that to me is the most important event. I really wanted to make him central because we all forget about Mamillius by the end when everyone’s celebrating ‘It’s OK’. It’s not OK!65 In performance he made this apparent in the most benign way at the end of the production: As [Hermione] speaks to the kneeling Leontes and her prostrate daughter, the action freezes. Donnellan allows himself a final intervention and brings the dead Mamillius on stage [led by Time]. The boy wanders about, inspecting the faces of the newcomers to the court, before looking up at his father’s face, touching him in blessing and final absolution. Time summons the boy, and they leave hand in hand. It was a risky device but one of complex pain and reconciliation found in the moment by a director who needed to ‘remind us of the boy who stays lost’.66 Carol Rutter and I read the ending differently, she finding the child’s look ‘finally uninterpretable’, ‘Sad? Reproachful? Forgiving? Or not? His look told a story only the child could tell, and now wouldn’t.’67 Did we see something played differently on a different night or did we see what we wanted to see? This refusal to forget what the play is willing to forget but which the audience, even without such an intervention, may not forget may preserve its enigma, be something read on to, not reading.

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A different artform can make possible a startlingly different effect. Christopher Weeldon’s three-act ballet from the play to a score by Joby Talbot (Royal Ballet, 2014) recognized the silence about Mamillius at the end but incorporated him into the final scene’s statue, now not Hermione alone but mother and son, something, as Nicholas Hytner, who suggested the idea to Weeldon, commented, ‘you couldn’t do in a production of the play because you’d wonder why nobody talked about him’.68 When Hermione comes back to life, the Mamillius statue remains – for, as Orgel said of every production of the play, ‘no statue of Mamillius comes to life’.69 At the end, after Hermione has gone off with Perdita, leaving Leontes with the statue of his dead son, Leontes ‘reaches out to it as if to see if he can bring Mamillius back from the dead too. All the life of the previous pas de deux with Hermione goes out of him when he realises he can’t and he leaves the stage broken and alone.’70 The statue remains, for the audience both unforgotten and unforgettable.

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Needing forgetfulness If this chapter had an epigraph, it would be from Goethe: ‘Where concern is lost, memory fares likewise.’1 We can characterize forgetting as problematic in two forms. The first, by far the less common, is the difficulty of achieving forgetting (see pp. 89–93). A. R. Luria’s patient S. with an exceptional memory found himself painfully incapable of forgetting so that, in Luria’s phrase, ‘the big question for him, and the most troublesome, was how he could learn to forget’, creating what Edward S. Casey identifies as ‘techniques of active forgetting’.2 For almost everyone else, the problem is the reverse, forcing us to develop modes of active remembering, whichever of the many available techniques, ancient and modern, that we may adopt as an enabling for us not to forget, as a resistance to the power of forgetting. But the inevitability of the failure of such devices is central to our experience. As Eugène Minkowski phrases it (and I want to write that he ‘memorably phrases it’), ‘When we look back, we see things, whatever their importance may be, climbing slowly towards the eternal silence of oblivion’.3 As we cannot notforget much that we wish to remember, however much we try not to forget, so we construct ever more desperate and foredoomed ways of not-forgetting. We understand the nature of our society in part as defined by that ‘normal amnesia’ that Ernst Schachtel sees as ‘an illuminating index to the quality of any given culture and society’.4 I am not concerned here with complex public acts of cultural memory,

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however important these may be; instead, it is the normality of forgetting that matters. Much of the work on collective memory is constructed on the ‘recognition that memory is dependent upon its counterpart, forgetting … forgetfulness has been there first, and memory struggles to retrieve what it can’.5 This may be potently imaged as the tense cusp between memory and forgetfulness, as in Roubiliac’s 1749 monument to the 2nd Duke of Argyll in Westminster Abbey in which the figure of Fame has not completed writing the Duke’s title, frozen in time, ‘leaving it in the balance whether his name will be remembered or not’.6 But we know, in this and most other cases, that we prefer remembering to forgetting. We are now much less likely to value forgetting over remembering, forgetting in our turn – if we ever knew it – that the Greeks balanced the goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, with Lesmosyne, the goddess of forgetfulness (see pp. 98–9). It is forgetting, as much as sleep, that is the ‘Balm of hurt minds’(Macbeth, 2.2.40), a therapeutic process that enables us, not least, to delight in repetition, in the re-encounter with that that has been enabled to be forgotten. By this point, forgetting is beginning to be identified as being as much of a positive as remembering – indeed, in some circumstances, such as after traumatic experience, it may be far more of a positive. We may, as I have discussed above, often need to forget far more than we need to remember. Casey is intrigued both by what is forgotten and by how it is forgotten. The latter, the mechanisms of forgetting, are intriguing. Sleep, for instance, functions as a way of consolidating memory: we remember a number-string better if we have been asleep between being given the string and being asked to recall it than if there is no sleep in the interval. But forgetting is also often seen as a consequence of imperfectly formatted memory. Casey offers two versions of this: ‘truncated memories, those that were cut off in midcourse of their formation’ and ‘non-conscious memories, those that exist in fact but are stationed outside of conscious apprehension’.7 It is the former that is far more significant for performance analysis, those memories that cannot be formed properly, that, as it were, are formatted in the wrong platform and therefore prevent transfer to the system of recall we require. He is also fascinated by what he calls ‘double oblivion’, which he derives from Plato’s Gorgias: forgetting that we have forgotten. I shall return to it shortly.

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Forgetting in performance There has been a recurrent tendency to see the theatre as a space of memory. So, for instance, Marvin Carlson defines theatre as a ‘Memory Machine’ in the subtitle of his book on what he dubs ‘the haunted stage’, an art always complexly full of ghosts of various kinds. For Herbert Blau, ‘theatre is … a function of remembrance. Where memory is, theatre is’.8 The theatre director Anne Bogart is equally emphatic: ‘The act of memory is a physical act and lies at the heart of the art of the theatre. If the theatre were a verb, it would be “to remember”.’9 At root, we are always aware of the act of memory that is the actor’s performance, as in the old cliché of a question, ‘How do you remember all the lines?’ Cecilia Rubino, a theatre director and filmmaker, has explored how early modern memory systems might have helped Burbage and his colleagues with memorization skills.10 Given the risky business that memorizing is, we could, in that and in many other ways as well, just as easily and as accurately, define the theatre as a space of forgetting. It both encourages memory and, at times, makes it impossible to remember. So, for instance, the actor aims always to remember but one of the things audience members are most likely to remember is a moment when an actor forgot what to say. In a passage I quoted earlier, Coriolanus construes such a moment as a total disaster, ‘Like a dull actor now, / I have forgot my part and I am out, / Even to a full disgrace.’ (5.3.40–2). There are indeed moments when the disaster has a certain finality. The failure of memory or the fear of the failure that that failure would constitute can make actors retire. Charles Macklin, who played Shylock for nearly fifty years across the eighteenth century and to whom the role must have been remarkably familiar, played the part yet again in the spring of 1788, at the age of eighty-nine, exhausted after helping to put out a fire near the theatre the night before. At the end of the scene with Jessica (2.5) his memory failed and he apologized to the audience for ‘a terror of mind I never in my life felt before; it has totally destroyed my corporeal as well as mental faculties’.11 It was not his last performance – that would be over a year later, on 7 May 1789. On that day he asked Mrs Pope, who was to play Portia, ‘who is to play Shylock?’ and, when she said ‘Why you, to be sure’, responded ‘God help me – my memory, I am afraid, has left me.’ He

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struggled through a few scenes of the performance before informing the audience ‘he now found he was unable to proceed’.12 The fear of their memory failing at some point in a run leads others now to retire from the stage and stick to films and television where the memory can be short term and retakes mask the problems. The fear is central to the process of performing, as Shakespeare notes at the start of Sonnet 23, ‘As an unperfect actor on the stage / Who with his fear is put besides his part’ (1–2). Even in rehearsal, at the point at which an actor is off-book, needing a prompt – and thereby acknowledging publicly the failure of memory it involves – is painful. As Antony Sher commented, during the rehearsal process for Richard III, ‘Each time I have to take a prompt it feels like a tiny humiliation.’13 The problem may not be a matter of completely grinding to a halt but of forgetting a single word and having to grope for it without, as it were, alerting the audience to something having interrupted the flow of the memorization of the lines. I offer two examples. The first was during the run of an RSC production of Much Ado, directed by Gregory Doran in 2002, with Harriet Walter as Beatrice. On one of the nights I saw it, at the end of the orchard scene where Beatrice is gulled, Walter was alone onstage for the complex stanzaic soliloquy: What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true? Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much? Contempt, farewell; and maiden pride, adieu. No glory lives behind the back of such. (3.1.108–11) Except that that evening I distinctly heard Beatrice say ‘No gravy lives behind the back of such’. The next day I met Harriet Walter who immediately raised the mistake: ‘You were in last night, weren’t you? You heard what I said. I knew the word began with g and ended in y but I couldn’t remember it and gravy was the only word I could think of.’ Her failure of memory became my memory: the only moment I can now recall of that production, excellent though her performance was. The erasure of glory, an error Harriet Walter probably never made in the rest of the run, though the memory of the mistake was equally probably present every time she approached the phrase thereafter, seems part of the process of

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memory and forgetting, the always vulnerable, always potentially falsified reconstruction of memory that surrounds performance. In my memory of the actor’s forgetfulness, of Walter’s substitutive act that creates and burdens the space of this memory, this act of individual memory denies the collective memory of the group that saw that performance. But it is also the case that the moment makes visible to me the actor’s memory, a feature fundamental to performance only through its sustained masking, known only by its absence. We assume the actor remembers; we are troubled only by its temporary visibility. If the actor’s memory becomes visible at such a moment of forgetting and replacing, it becomes a local form of transmutation in the representation of that broad cultural process at the confluence of memory, performance and substitution that Joseph Roach so powerfully explored as the concept of ‘surrogation’ in Cities of the Dead.14 The particular problem of early modern actors’ memories and their forgetting their lines has been brilliantly explored by Lois Potter.15 But in 1988 she also surveyed the actors in the English Shakespeare Company’s cycle of the histories to ask them about their acts of memory, particularly significant when the actors were playing numerous roles across the sequence. There was one remarkable example of the kind of mistake Harriet Walter made: John Darrell, who had to say ‘Good my lord of Lancaster’ in one play and ‘My Lord of Gloucester’ in another, found himself addressing Richard of Gloucester as ‘Good my lord of Lanc-, Leicester – Gloucester’ (‘all famous cheeses’, he pointed out).16 The crucial difference between Darrell’s problem and Walter’s is its visibility/audibility. Walter did not stop and stumble over the word but carried on, her error heard and therefore audible to me but probably to very few others in the theatre that night. Some actors become remarkably prone to mistakes and the increasing incidence of error is something directors and audiences – and, most vulnerably, other members of the cast – have to decide how to or whether to tolerate. My second example explores this problem. Late in his career, Robert Stephens, whose memory was undoubtedly affected by his alcoholism and generally poor health, played Falstaff in Adrian Noble’s production of both parts of Henry IV for the RSC in 1991. In the scene where Falstaff gives

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his own version of the Gadshill robbery, increasing the number of men in buckram suits he fought with at each successive stage of the story-telling, he adds to the, now eleven, men in buckram ‘three misbegotten knaves in Kendal green’ (1 Henry IV, 2.5.216–17). Every time I saw the production, Stephens turned Kendal green into Kensal Green, from a coarse green woollen cloth, originally made in the town of Kendal in Cumbria in the Lake District in the north of England, and known as such since the fourteenth century, into the name of a London suburb, a stop on the Bakerloo line of the London underground and the location of one of London’s biggest cemeteries, famous for the number of theatre people buried there, which last may have been the reason it came to Robert Stephens’s mind as an intimation of mortality.17 What is more, the mistake had become so ingrained in the performance that Michael Maloney, as Prince Henry, always responded, a few lines later, ‘how couldst thou know these men in Kensal green … ?’ (226–7). The transformation of one place name into another is an easy error, especially when the substituted name is more familiar to someone who lived in London. Not in this case a matter only of forgetting but also of remembering, the alteration was carefully remembered through the run, where frequently, elsewhere in the plays, Stephens groped for any word that would do when his memory failed. Forgetting of the kind that Harriet Walter and Robert Stephens performed passes unnoticed by almost all the audience. One has to know 1 Henry IV pretty well to notice that Kendal has become Kensal. Much misremembering, forgetting or mislearning is of this kind. In the only substantial study I know of the details of Shakespeare actors’ forgetfulness, Laurie Maguire studied six of the BBC Shakespeare television productions, checking the words spoken on the videotapes against the playtext of the performance version that the BBC published. As she comments, ‘critics interested in memorial error can collate the BBC text as published with the text as performed’.18 The time pressures of production meant that scenes could not be endlessly reshot in search of verbal accuracy. As the script editor commented, ‘the version that is finally chosen for transmission has to be the best in terms of performance rather than absolute textual correctness’.19 The six plays produced 598 errors, many tiny changes of quantity or possessives, tense or mood, but many were more substantial ranging from small additions (O yes, truly, then, why, come, ay, O, and other extra-metrical versions

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of ‘umm’ and ‘er’), to small substitutions (‘Well met Hastings!’ for ‘How now Hastings!’) to changes of number (Caesar’s ‘three and thirty wounds’ became ‘three and twenty wounds’) to garbled transpositions and major omissions.20 Is this always forgetting, as I seem to be suggesting and Maguire does not? That is unlikely. Often it may well be that the actor never learned the lines accurately enough. Often it may be that the extrametrical is a sign of the mind moving towards but not yet having found the stored memory of the accurate line. It may be equally the result of an actor’s mind not as strongly attuned to the rhythms of the line as might be wished, failing to sense how that extra-metrical addition harms the metre, causes its own rhythmic stumble. In this, it may well be that the modern actor is less aware than early modern predecessors. The examples of Walter and Stephens, though not Darrell, represent what Evelyn Tribble, in her exploration of distributed cognition, termed ‘fluent forgetting’, an event in which, for instance, metrically equivalent substitutions are made unnoticed by the hearers and even, at times, by the speakers. Tribble quotes from a study by D. C. Rubin of undergraduates’ memory of Beatles lyrics, where Rubin found that ‘rhythm and poetics tended to be conserved’ so that, for example ‘to help with good Rocky’s revival’ is remembered as ‘to help with good Rocky’s survival’.21 Tribble’s concept of fluent forgetting ‘allows us to think about how players coped with the mnemonic demands of their profession’ (72). Rightly recognizing that our notions of memory have ‘been shaped by concepts of exact verbatim fidelity that were unlikely to have operated in Shakespeare’s period’ (72), she finds that often Maguire’s study shows slips that ‘typically remain within the constraints of the verse, or alter it only slightly’ so that, for example, ‘to look on death no more’ becomes ‘to look on earth no more’,22 a change similar to two of the ones I have quoted: ‘Well met’ to ‘How now’ and ‘three and thirty’ to ‘three and twenty’. Tribble sharply argues that, ‘in the early modern playing system, prompting was built into and distributed across the system: It is called “verse”’ (71). But she also is at pains to emphasize that fluent forgetting ‘is not meant to imply indifference to the task of memory or to the playwright’s words’ (74). The mnemonic problem for the early modern actor was prodigiously demanding in a system with such rapid changes of play, from day to day across many dozens of plays in a season, compared with the modern rep actor in, say, the

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RSC, who, at most, may be in four or five plays in a season, with longish runs early that help to fix the text as well as the production, and with rehearsal techniques such as line-runs when a play returns to performance after not being performed for a week or three. There are limits in Tribble’s study: she does not, for instance, consider how fluent forgetting might operate in prose, where the support structure of repeated fundamental rhythms is not present, for all that prose can be as carefully and consciously rhythmic as verse. Memorizing prose and performing it might produce both different techniques for making the forgetting and substitution invisible and fluent as well as a different frequency of visible forgetting, making apparent something less than fluent in prose than verse. I wonder, too, whether, outside the well-known early modern memory systems such as the placing of memory in imagined structures, there were early modern equivalents for, say, the body memory of the modern dancer or the finger memory of the modern classical pianist. Nonetheless, her work brilliantly sets out the professional’s aim: to make any forgetting invisible and non-disruptive, just as Maloney’s taking up of Stephens’s ‘Kensal’ helped make Stephens’s error invisible to all auditors but a very few.

Forgetting the plot In a comment in an online thread of reviews at amazon.com about the pleasures of reading a text-message version of Romeo and Juliet renamed YOLO Juliet,23 Paige Bradish praised the new version: I read Romeo and Juliet when I was a freshman in high school about 5 years ago. Being that young it was kind of hard trying to read through and understand everything because it was in old english, but now I’m pretty clear on what the story is all about. Its a tragic love story and I loved it even though the ending was sad.24 The last sentence and its tension – ‘I loved it even though … ’ – speaks eloquently of the place of tragedy in popular culture. But even more intriguing is the concern we should have that Ms Bradish only now, thanks to YOLO Juliet, understood the plot of the play.

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Reading for plot – and her emphasis is on reading the play, not on watching it – ought to have been possible even though the play was in ‘old english’. Clearly her teacher did not manage to make clear the difference between old and early modern English either. Moaning in a snide way about failing pedagogies is not the point, however satisfying it may sometimes be, but how people understand and retain the memory of the plot of Romeo is a much more interesting question. Pavol Liska decided to survey people, asking each to outline the plot of the play as they recalled it. Liska is co-founder with Kelly Cooper of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, a company which takes its name from Kafka’s Amerika, where the central figure sees an advertisement: ‘Personnel is being hired for the Theater in Oklahoma! The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma is calling you!’25 Liska had never read the play himself but those in the company who had still found its details hazy: as Cooper put it, ‘We ourselves weren’t even able to remember what happened so we went kind of in search of it’.26 As Billy Collins writes in his poem ‘Forgetfulness’, ‘The name of the author is the first to go / followed by the title, the plot’.27 From the thirty people Liska interviewed by phone and whose responses he recorded, the company selected eight to form monologues, with the text exactly as transcribed from the recordings, down to each cough, umm and er, in a performance piece called, quite simply, Romeo and Juliet. The eight sources are named in the performance documentation but who was responsible for which monologue is not identified. I am not concerned with the performance work itself in any of its complexities, only with the corpus of rememberings, misrememberings and, mostly, forgettings that the monologues as transcribed constitute.28 The material is difficult to exemplify. Of course, I can quote the misquotations, such as, for example: ‘What light – / Through yonder window / Speaks? / It is the East! / And Juliet is the West!’ / (cough) / Something like that.’ (84).29 Or the desperate attempts to find a name in the recesses of the memory: ‘Romeo like gets in a fight / With some guy with a very – / Flourishy name like – / Like – uh … / EURISTHEPISS! / Or something like that!’ (90). Or mangled versions of the plot: ‘Romeo killed – / I think it was his – ? / Juliet’s brother. And … / In the process – he was injured. / Juliet finds him – / Uh. / Thinking he’s dead, / She kills herself – he wakes up – sees her – kills himself. / How’s that? That good enough? / Am I good – /

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AM I CLOSE TO IT? / It’s been YEARS since I read it!’ (76). Taken at random, each would seem like a local moment of forgetful chaos, at least when viewed patronizingly from the point of view of this scholar at his desk (and yet I think, as I write that, how often I, presciently, don’t trust my memory even for a famous quotation and have to look it up or realize that I have made a small but painful error – at least painful to me – when describing a plot point in class). Hermann Ebbinghaus published his establishment of the experimental basis for the forgetting curve – or, as it is often known, Ebbinghaus curve – in 1885, putting the study on a footing of objective evidence, using calibrated material and statistical tests of significance,30 that effectively only validated what had long been known: that memory of specific events decays over time. Liska’s phonecalls reveal particular characteristics of the forgetting or misremembering of Shakespeare. It is no surprise that some events get mangled and the switch, repeated quite often, between Romeo and Juliet of who takes the sleeping drug and who uses poison to die is a sign of a certain facet of interchangeability in memory. Nor would one expect names like Mercutio to stay accessible, though the names Capulets and Montagues do, albeit again with their progeny switched. Few recall Friar Laurence at all and nobody names him. Given that many are recalling reading the play in high school, again we should expect that, as Worthen puts it, ‘some are most focused on whether or when or how often Romeo and Juliet have sex’,31 for example: ‘Is that the night that Romeo boinks her? / I’m not sure. / He might boink her that night … (pause) / No maybe he comes back’ (95). Some are also focused on Romeo’s probable masturbating habits: ‘he’s always off brooding by himself. / Prob’ly jacking off or somethin’ (93). Over and over again, what is also apparent is the pain of trying to remember, the recurrent anxiety about failure (as if this is another school test: ‘I HAVE to remember this! / Right? / This is like – / REQUIRED READING!’ [85]), as well as the awareness of having forgotten and, given how much is missing, the unawareness of having forgotten how much the rememberer is forgetting. When Worthen, tracking the kinds of memories preserved, comments that the play is ‘remembered as an intrinsically verbal organism, its action bound to specific lines of dialogue, regained through a manifest effort of memorial reconstruction’,32 I am not quite convinced that is always and everywhere. It is certainly true of some moments, such as the

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‘balcony’ scene, or the first meeting of the two lovers or their only morning together: ‘Oh, that’s the sparrow – no, it’s not the sparrow, it’s the pigeon! – or somethin’ – / The dawn, no it can’t be the dawn, it must be a pigeon!’ (95). But, for instance, the sword-fights, widely and vividly recalled, are never linked to dialogue. As Worthen superbly explores, the play is defined by the rememberers as a literary form, a print-text that results in a memory derived from performance being apologized for, defined as ‘illicit’,33 whether the source is West Side Story (which is ‘just – BASED – on it. / It’s not anything exactly like’ [80]) or film: ‘I know I’m missing a huge chunk in the middle. / Haah! Ha ha! / But that’s all I can – / GET! / From my brain! / And you know what’s sad is that I read it in high school, / and really what I’m remembering is the movie! / Which one? / The Leonardo DiCaprio … Claire Danes movie!’ (85). The speaker finds the substitution of film for book ‘sad’, a sign of loss, not, as Worthen and I might see it, as gain. As Worthen, sadly and mockingly, notes, ‘the “literary drama” that should live in the book and volume of the brain has been swept away by the trivial recordings of performance’. If the balcony of the ‘balcony’ scene is emphatically not Shakespeare’s, for, as my scare quotes are designed to mark, the word balcony does not appear in the play and the term is a result of stage sets in the eighteenth century and long thereafter,34 the window at which Juliet appears is not a theatrical invention, though, as one person wonders, ‘Or maybe that just for – like theater purposes’ (89). If theatre is not forgotten, it should have been, for it has, it would seem, no right to substitute for the memory of what was read. The Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s performance stages Shakespeare’s play ‘as loss, as lost writing, a phantom document in the personal history of reading’.35 What is lost, forgotten, transmogrified into a comic version of its tragic self, is inevitably seen as a sign of failure, not the remarkable survival of a fragment but a chronicle of the chasm of oblivion into which the read or seen object has uncontrollably descended.

Resisting performance as loss When an actor forgets a line, the moment is often powerfully formative of audience’s memories. But, for the audience, the

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moment of leaving the theatre at the end of any performance is always already to be aware of the excess of forgetfulness, of how much we immediately cannot remember of what has just occurred, of the inadequacy of the attempt to remember as, instead, we create constructs of memory, deliberate attempts to fix the memory of the event. It is not simply that memory is partial and fragmentary but rather that the degree of the fragmentation, the vast and necessary failure in its being partial, its inability to be impartial, becomes the controlling feature of its creation. Hence there is the insistence with which Simon Forman, our earliest extant extensive reviewer of Shakespeare in performance, in the four reports of productions, three by Shakespeare and one not, that he wrote in his ‘Bocke of Plaies’ in 1611, writes, as it were to and for himself, so repeatedly the aggressive command ‘Remember’, five times in his account of the non-Shakespearean play about Richard II alone. The report becomes a series of instructions to himself to ‘Remember therin howe … Also remember howe … Remember also … Remember therin Also howe … Remember also howe … ’, an aggregation of memories through the conscious act of remembering in the writing of the performance into memory. And Forman, almost as frequently, writes an injunction to ‘observe’, where the imperative is also a memory of what has been observed: note what it signifies but also note what I saw. So ‘Observe ther howe’ in his account of The Winter’s Tale parallels ‘Remember howe’ and also, in his notes on the Macbeth performance, becomes ‘ther was to be obserued’, memory as a record of the act of spectatorship.36 The fragments of what Forman chooses to record bear witness to his awareness of the inadequacy of the writing as observation and as remembrance. Forman’s record leaves the play dissolved into summary of plot (often messy, especially, though unsurprisingly, with Cymbeline which ends, rather desperately, with ‘& howe she was found by lucius etc’), moments of performed event (like the substantial account of the appearance of Banquo’s ghost behind Macbeth), summations of moral learning achieved or reinforced (‘beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawning fellouse’), and so on. Tempting though it is to argue from absence into a different text being performed, I cannot, in this mode of record, see the failure to mention the statue scene as a strong indication, as some have argued, that the scene was not present in the performance that Forman saw. Would we manage better than Forman? What do I not forget? Not the theatre novice that many of my students are, I do not

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watch Shakespeare productions for plot and there is therefore a reduced emphasis on the construction of narrative as memory. But the weight of material I wish to and will be unable to remember from the event is a complex demand on the processes of memory. On the one hand, there is too much I know I will forget and, as with Casey’s ‘double forgetting’, most of it I will have forgotten that I have forgotten. On the other, that which remains at a distance from the event may be conditioned by, precisely, what I need or would like to remember. Casey’s account of ‘forgetting forgetting’ starts from a passage in Plato’s Gorgias. Socrates describes the story told by Sicilian who considered ‘the thoughtless’ and that part of the soul where the desires are, the licentious and fissured part, he named a leaky jar in his allegory, … these uninitiate will be most wretched, and will carry water into their leaky jar with a sieve which is no less leaky. And then by the sieve, as my story-teller said, he means the soul: and the soul of the thoughtless he likened to a sieve, as being perforated, since it is unable to hold anything by reason of its unbelief and forgetfulness.37 The image of trying to fill a leaky jar with a leaky sieve is, Casey suggests, to lose track twice of the very memories that one is trying (in vain) to preserve … it is to forget the means, the process, by which memories placed in a porous place come to be forgotten. In double oblivion, we forget not just the contents of the two jars – as would occur in simple leakage – but their very existence. We forget the vehicles of our own forgetting.38 As Stéphane Symons argues, this double oblivion is significantly absent in some major theorists: ‘No more than Freud does Heidegger properly address the possibility of a complete nihilism that enables a “forgetting of forgetting” and embraces, rather than counters, the passage of time.’39 Performance studies, on the other hand, have been willing to consider this process. Not least important in Casey’s construction is the place of the forgetter as well as that which is forgotten. ‘Performance memory’, as Dennis Kennedy uses the term, centralizes the observer’s

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self in the event: as he puts it, ‘I am the constant protagonist of remembered events. So I am also the constant protagonist of my remembered spectation.’40 As Kennedy is wondering ‘Is there an objective standard for remembering?’, he also posits, most usefully, two forms of memory: ‘Is there a distance between my personal memory and my professional memory?’ Such memory processes, such traces of what has not been forgotten, have, in his analysis, four significant characteristics: that he is the protagonist, that ‘the more the performance moved or excited me, the less likely my memory of it is completely accurate’, that ‘my heightened or flashbulb memory of specific details may have caused me to create a context for those moments that is independent of what actually occurred’, and that ‘“playing back” my memory of performance is itself a type of dream performance’.41 Testing out Kennedy’s perceived characteristics is a difficult process. The material that survives forgetfulness would vary over time, of course, but, more particularly, it varies according to the identity of the spectator. My fragmentary denials of the universal oblivion of forgetting are also framed by my pedagogy and my research, by, precisely, the concerns I have that make me will myself, to adapt Goethe’s phrase I have used at the start of this chapter, not to let my memory falter – or, rather, to create memory, however falsifying it might prove to be – because of those professional concerns. Watching Shakespeare in performance cannot be separated from my professional self and the personal is compromised by and integrated within the ‘professional memory’. I have elsewhere been concerned with the presence of my selves in the act of watching42 but here I am engaged in the primacy of the presence of one self, the professional, in the retention of material: what is retained is dominated by what is perceived, at the moment of retention or recalling, as having the potential to be or having already been proved to be useful.

Not-quite-forgetting performance I have constructed the next sequence as my attempt to retrieve from the oceans of oblivion fragments of a particular performance, Barbara Gaines’s production of King Lear at the Chicago

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Shakespeare Theatre which I watched on 2 October 2014. I picked this production because it was fairly recent when I first attempted writing this, because it was not outstandingly good, and because I watched it with a class on ‘Shakespeare: Editing and Performance’. While I did take notes while watching, I deliberately did not have them to hand as I wrote this and also chose not to look for my file of reviews of the production. The second and third of my reasons for the choice need a little elaboration: an outstanding production may perhaps resist the normal rate of attrition of detail, while a show watched with a class prescribes a certain way of watching, observing in order (a) to conduct a class discussion, an event in which I always use devices to make the students bring memory into the classroom, assembling fragments to bring the production back to a form of temporary and adequate immediacy, and (b) to read and assess the students’ brief reports that I require. But I avoided looking at their reports before my writing later. In the situation in which I saw that King Lear I cannot watch without being part (in the role of instructor) of a pedagogic activity and my memory material is defined, even so long after the event itself, by what was constructed then in terms of what might be good for classroom work, those choices conditioning the acts of firm memory and equally of what could so easily be forgotten. Nothing of what remains seems to me disconnected from that pedagogic purpose. In other words, I am trying here to see what remains from my forgetting and how exactly it manifests itself. Insofar as I can, I am attempting here to order the comments accurately in the order in which they appeared in my memory when I chose to write about this particular production, a choice I delayed finalizing until I was about to draft this section. Each might be prefaced by an emoji, for the materials that survive are often intensified into survival by the emotions associated with them and, quite probably, altered by them (as Kennedy suggests). Instead of an emoji I offer a label for each, itself necessarily a simplification of the response’s emotions. 1. Irritation. Though our seats were not sold as ‘restricted view’, we were close beside the proscenium line and could not see upstage of it. 2. Curiosity. This limited view proved not to matter until shortly before the interval when the massive façade of a building (Lear’s palace) that was placed against the

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proscenium crashed down on to the stage as Lear faced upstage towards it. Was it indeed on ‘Blow, winds’ (3.2.1) or is that simply where it would seem it would most conveniently have been placed? The curious in me wondered immediately how the effect was managed without risking the actor. Some days later, a colleague told me that Larry Yando (playing Lear) has to have both feet on a sensitive plate or the safety mechanisms are designed to prevent the set-piece from falling. 3. Irrelevance. As thrilling as the collapsing set was (and it was one of the most exhilarating moments of stage spectacle I have ever seen), the way it dropped over Lear so that he came up through a window aperture reminded me at once of Buster Keaton facing the camera as a house-front behind him falls over him so that he is unhurt as an upper-storey window aligns with his body. Later I check and find it is from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) and that it occurs in the midst of a storm. Is that, I wonder, what made the director and/or set designer think of it? And is the link to Keaton anything other than a disruption? 4. Relevance. Recalling the set reminds me of a major setelement present at the start: a painting of a group of children, probably mid-seventeenth century. Later I searched for this (and this recurrent activity of post-performance research is a clear sign of my own scholarly concern[s] that connects the memory with what it might here signify within the meanings the production seeks to generate) and find it is after Sir Anthony Van Dyck and shows Charles I’s children, the fate of whose father, not present in the painting, itself suggesting, in retrospect, some kind of a connection with Lear and his daughters. 5. Disappointment. But thinking of the painting reminds me that the costuming was not Caroline but broadly eclectic with, for someone, modern military camouflage (was it Edmund? Edgar?), the deliberate historical imprecision not creating a coherent world. 6. Inadequate. Somewhere lurks a memory of a particular soundscape and Frank Sinatra’s name linked to it and, working hard, I recall the use throughout of Frank Sinatra

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songs, often distorted by Lear’s madness, many having lyrics that could be heard as connecting with the moment in the play (which one was it that was used at the end of the show?). Lear at the start used a remote to click through songs, irascibly throwing it away and being given another by a court official (Kent? Gloucester? Neither?). Again, a later piece of information: Barbara Gaines had found great comfort in Sinatra during the period around her mother’s death. But that left me with a strong sense that this was a good rehearsal thought that should never have reached the stage and that, for all the truth of Noël Coward’s line, ‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is’ (Amanda in Private Lives), and though I do not see Sinatra’s music as ‘cheap’, it disturbs the scale of King Lear, turning the tension down, making the vast too constrictedly populist. 7. Pitch. And that, in turn, makes me recall how Yando’s Lear was so strongly and powerfully pitched at the opening that he had nowhere to go as the play developed, certainly no further peaks to reach, and that that seemed a consequence of the generally mediocre quality of the rest of the cast, as if the actor were trying to ramp up the tension and scale without enough support from the ensemble. 8. And then I realize how little I remember of the rest of the cast (was Goneril African American or was that Regan? Or neither?); and how unfunny, how un-anything was the Fool; how Edmund’s charisma was achieved only by the actor’s frequent shirtlessness; and so on. 9. Inadequacy. Not, now, an inadequacy in the production but the inadequacy of my memory, the overpowering awareness of how hard it would be to recover much more without assistance. And the absences throughout: not just the insecurity over particular details, all ones that, in a different context, I could resolve by going to the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre archive or looking at the reviews, but also the lack of any precision about so much of the density of the text. There are no readings of particular lines left in my memory, no knowledge of cuts and reorderings (though I seem to recall some fairly radical decisions at the end to enable a Sinatra audio clip to close the show), no sense of

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the arc of the production, of its approach to the play, of its mode of generating meaning and interpretation. All that is left are small tokens and traces, ‘flashbulb memories’ that are fragmentary and inadequate as records of the immense detail and also as witnesses to the immensity of concept and vision that are fundamental to any substantial production of a Shakespeare play, just as fragmentary and inadequate as the ‘translations’ of No Fear Shakespeare or the fragmentary textmessage versions of OMG Shakespeare or the summarized methods of John Crace and John Sutherland’s Incomplete Shakespeare are to the complexities of the language, dramaturgy and potency of the plays they reproduce.43 Is this really the best I can do? After all the productions I have seen, in spite of the ways in which, during classroom discussion, I usually remember and mention and engage with so much more than my students, largely inexperienced as they are in analysing Shakespeare in performance, is this all I can manage to recall? What is forgotten, what is experienced as potentially memorable but which ends up being inadequately committed to memory, is far more massive in extent, far more troubling in its absence than what is remembered. If performance is marked always by its ephemerality, it is also marked by the inordinate mass of what the spectators, however much they may wish it, are doomed to forget. I may usually occupy a position of lordly smug superiority over the inadequacies and limitations of, say, OMG Shakespeare or The Incomplete Shakespeare, both offering a performance in print of the plays that is always aware it is representing only a fragment of the originating text. But here I have moved to a position that represents my inadequacies as rememberer. In one sense, of course, this is nothing more than the inevitability of memorial decay, set against the purposive usefulness of what my memory retains. But it is also, I suggest, precisely the magnificent and appalling density of Shakespeare performance in the theatre, especially as it is experienced and perceived by the professional self, that creates and enforces the inevitability of the extent of this forgetting. Within any moment, as study of the theatrical event has impressively argued,44 there is an excess of signification such that it cannot be adequately absorbed, becoming, as successive moments compete for attention, exactly the kind of truncated memories that

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Casey points to as denying consolidation. In the rapidity of the sequence and the complexity of the moment lies a tension of speed and excess that forbids adequate remembering. In moving from a consideration of the impossibility of completely forgetting Hamlet, Kennedy turns to Geoffrey Sonnabend’s theory of obliscence, a concept he outlined in a three-volume work, Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, published in 1946. As Sonnabend so eloquently summed it up: We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrievability of its moments and events.45 Sonnabend was a ‘memory researcher’ and his magnum opus was published by Northwestern University Press. Valentine Worth ends a brief summary of Sonnabend’s theory with an encouragement that ‘A more thorough and detailed study of Sonnabend’s work offers its student rich rewards as well as many surprises.’46 The surprise, as Kennedy explains but ‘Worth’ does not, is that Sonnabend never existed: he was invented by David Wilson, founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, a witty mixture of the true and the entirely fake.47 Nonetheless, Wilson/Sonnabend/Worth’s theory is full of good sense: when a Plane of Experience intersects with the Cone of Obliscence (no, this part is not good sense), ‘a three tier series of events ensues … : (1) being involved in an experience (2) remembering an experience (3) having forgotten an experience.’48 The problem, I would argue, is accepting the force of the third event, coming to terms with forgetting, reconciling ourselves to the absences without diminishing the awkwardly utilitarian nature of what is retained. For all the recovery mechanisms we can use and consult – audio and video recordings, files of reviews, promptbooks, still photography and so on, the basic materials of theatre history that can also be applied as prompts to our own recollections – we disappoint ourselves in the extent of our forgetfulness of that which we have experienced directly rather than recovered, avoiding acknowledging the fullness of our forgetting, all the more apparent when we seriously analyse our mental file-cabinets.

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7 Shakespeare Forgetting/ Forgetting Shakespeare

Shakespeare forgetting As I move towards ending this study, I offer a chapter that begins, I hope, to open up two further areas for future research, work lightly touched on here but leading, whether for me or others, to more work that encouragingly seems to offer rewards in being done. I begin this chapter, a chapter of two halves, like its title, with some minutiae of Shakespeare’s and early modern dramaturgy, aspects of crafting a play where Shakespeare seems to have forgotten quite what he was doing. If Hand D in Sir Thomas More is indeed Shakespeare’s, it allows us to see some evidence of his writing process, disputable evidence admittedly but still well worth considering. Here I shall be looking at other moments where his practice of writing seems to me to become visible and I shall end this section moving more tentatively to other examples that may or may not fall under the capacious protective umbrella of forgetting. As we see what Shakespeare does not or might not be remembering so what he does recall comes into sharper relief. Signs of his forgetting may make us newly aware of his writing practice. At the start of the second scene of Antony and Cleopatra there is a (superficially) unremarkable stage direction for a large group of characters to come onto the stage: ‘Enter Enobarbus, Lamprius, a Southsayer [sic], Rannius, Lucillius, Charmian, Iras, Mardian the Eunuch, and Alexas’ (F1, 2v6v). As editors tackled the problems of the play in general and of this passage in particular, they identified

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two difficulties here. One was whether everyone entered at the same time and through the same entrance or whether there were possibly – though not necessarily – one or more delayed entries and one or two groups, for example a group of Romans with the soothsayer and a group of Egyptians. But there was also the problem of three names that never appeared in the play again. Lamprius might or might not be the name of the soothsayer but that still left two silent named characters, Rannius and Lucillius. Rowe simply cut both of them and removed the name Lamprius too. Later editors noted that Lamprius, in the form Lampryas, was mentioned by Plutarch, in North’s translation, as ‘my grandfather’ who told Plutarch of a physician friend of his who was taken to meet Antony’s cook who showed him ‘the wonderfull sumptuous charge and preparation of one only supper’ at which there were ‘eight wilde boares rosted whole’.1 Given Shakespeare’s interest in the ‘Life of Marcus Antonius’ and his reference at 2.2.189–90 to ‘Eight wild boars roasted whole at a breakfast’, it is clear where the name Lampryas/Lamprius came from. Lucillius is mentioned three times in Plutarch’s ‘Life of Antony’ as a friend of Antony’s. Everyone seemed to ignore Rannius until Kittredge identified the name as a minim error for Ramnus (= Rhamnus) who was a freed slave and one of Antony’s guards.2 In the Parthian campaign Antony, fearing defeat, ‘called for one Rhamnus … and made him giue him his faith that he would thrust his sword through him when he would bid him, and cut of his head’.3 That solved the source of the three names, two at least of whom are mute in the scene. But why did Shakespeare create the names for characters when they neither speak nor are named in the dialogue? Playgoers cannot know that the soothsayer’s name is (or indeed is not) Lamprius and that two of the people with Enobarbus are Rhamnus and Lucillius. George Steevens thought that It is not impossible, indeed, that [the three] might have been speakers in this scene as it was first written down by Shakespeare, who afterwards thought proper to omit their speeches, though at the same time he forgot to erase their names as originally announced at their collective entrance.4 What Steevens offers is a narrative of composition, just as Schanzer, arguing his case for the influence on the play of Shakespeare’s

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reading of the Countess of Pembroke’s translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine, points to the long scene between Antony and Lucillius there as a reason for Shakespeare’s use of the name in 1.2, for he might have ‘originally planned a similar role for Lucillius as Antony’s staunchest and most loyal friend’.5 There are, of course, very few moments in any narrative of Shakespeare’s compositional practices that are anything other than entirely hypothetical but, for Steevens, Shakespeare might have forgotten to cut the names. Forgetting names is a prime characteristic of our quotidian forgetfulness but Shakespeare’s problem with names is more frequently a problem of forgetting to make sure a character speaks them and it is difficult to find in some at least of these cases anything other than error and forgetfulness. Take, as an example, the name of Orlando’s older brother in As You Like It, the oldest of the three. The middle brother is named by Orlando in the first speech in the play: ‘My brother Jaques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly of his profit’ (1.1.5–6). It might be confusing that there is also a lord with Duke Senior called Jaques who is identified as ‘the melancholy Jaques’ twice in the first scene in the forest (2.1.26 and 41). It is, in some respects, as if the second Jaques usurps the prominence initially accorded to the first. Shakespeare may, I suppose, have originally intended the brother Jaques to have been more prominent. Shakespeare reduces the risk of confusion, whether accidentally or deliberately, by never naming the middle brother when he turns up at the end of the play. The Folio gives his entrance as ‘Enter Second Brother’ and a speech prefix of ‘2. Bro.’ (sig. S2r). If any playgoer remembers his name from the very beginning, it is a sign of a remarkable memory. Most neither know nor care about this late-appearing brother’s name. Unlike Jaques, Oliver’s name has some at least potential significance. Orlando is the Italian form of Roland, as in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. In a sense, Orlando, the youngest, is the one who has inherited his father’s name, which Orlando mentions early on, ‘Sir Rowland de Boys’ (F’s spelling, at 1.1.53–4), an Anglicization of Sir Roland de Bois, Sir Roland of the Woods, appropriately for a play much concerned with forests. Roland/Orlando’s friend and wise counsellor in the Chanson de Roland is Oliver (French: Olivier; Italian: Oliviero). Shakespeare’s Oliver does not behave with the wise heroism of his namesake, either initially or when reformed. If Shakespeare intends the audience to see the gap between the Roland/Olivier and Orlando/Oliver relationships, he does not

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make it possible or, as I wish to suggest, forgets to make it possible, for this Oliver is never named in the dialogue: all seven spoken occurrences of the name in the play refer to Sir Oliver Martext, ‘the vicar of the next village’ (3.3.40–1). As with Jaques, there are two Olivers in the play but only one is named in the dialogue and that is not Orlando’s brother. Perhaps the namelessness is unimportant and Shakespeare chose the name without any interest in its resonances. It might even be a private joke of some irretrievable kind. There is, however, a strikingly interconnected group of people who have names that the playgoers never hear. In each case Shakespeare seems to have chosen a name and then discarded it and/or forgotten about it, leaving title far more importantly present. In each case the survival of the name in stage directions and elsewhere seems a matter of chance, I would suggest a matter of forgetfulness, their survival leaving a trace behind of – again (and, again, only possibly) – a compositional process. The Prince in Romeo is named ‘Escalus’, the usual modernized form of his name, only in the stage direction for his first entrance: ‘Enter Prince Eskales, with his traine’ (Q2, 1599, sig. A4r). The personal name, a version of ‘della Scala’, appears four times in Brooke’s poem, the first as early as line 13: ‘Escalus, / as prince alone dyd raigne’.6 In Measure for Measure, where the name ‘Escalus’ is the play’s very first word spoken by the Duke (1.1.1), the Duke is named only in the list of ‘The names of all the Actors’ at the end of the play in F1, filling up the bottom of the page (sig. G6v), where he appears as ‘Vincentio: the Duke.’ And in Hamlet, the name Claudius appears in Q2 only in the entrance direction for 1.2, ‘Enter Claudius, King of Denmarke’ and in the speech-heading for his first speech, ‘Claud.’ (sig. B3v). F1 preserves the first but not the second, which becomes its subsequently usual form: ‘King.’ (sig.2n5r). Three rulers, each with a name left isolated somewhere in the play, each unnamed in the dialogue, each known only by his title: duke, prince, king. I have annoyed generations of my students with the question ‘When you are watching Hamlet, what is the name of Hamlet’s uncle?’, but they come to realize that a figure known as Claudius is different from one identified as king, uncle, father, mother, adulterate beast, bloody, bawdy villain, and so on but without a personal name. When the New York company Theatre for a New Audience

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brought Cymbeline to the RSC’s Other Place in November 2001, the actor playing Queen, at a public discussion session with RSC actors, complained about how difficult it was to play a character who had no name and was firmly told by an RSC actor that that was not a problem but a key point in constructing a performance in that role. A title without a name makes an actor approach a part with a dominant sense of that lack and an equally strong awareness of how the title and its concomitant power functions. I differentiate this kind of naming from, say, the assortment of Scottish lords in Macbeth. Lennox, Angus, Caithness and Menteith are often onstage and are carefully indicated by entrance directions but none of them hear their own names. Shakespeare probably found the names in Holinshed: ‘Manie of them that before were thanes, were at this time made earles, as Fife, Menteth, Atholl, Levenox, Morrey, Cathnes, Rosse, and Angus.’7 Ross is named, by Malcolm, as soon as he appears: ‘The worthy thane of Ross’ (1.2.45). The others become no more particularized than the citizens in Coriolanus, who start to be numbered afresh, each time they appear, in the order in which they speak in that scene; First Citizen in 1.1 is not necessarily the same as First Citizen in 2.3, though he could be. Productions can make the citizens as individualized as they wish but we will not know any of them by name. Whether or not this kind of naming is a result of Shakespeare’s forgetfulness or what T. J. B. Spencer once dubbed ‘Shakespeare’s careless art’,8 it seems to me different from an exchange like this in The Tempest: ferdinand     Myself am Naples, Who with mine eyes, never since at ebb, beheld The King my father wrecked. miranda   Alack, for mercy! ferdinand Yes, faith, and all his lords, the Duke of Milan And his brave son being twain. prospero [aside]     The Duke of Milan And his more braver daughter could control thee … (1.2.435–40)

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Theobald began his note on the Duke of Milan’s son with ‘Here seems a slight forgetfulness in our poet’.9 For him, the answer lay in a first thought subsequently ‘found … unnecessary’. Others argued it came from a source (none has been found). Staunton posited a cut ‘to shorten the representation … while the allusion to it was inadvertently maintained’.10 Coleridge, in a marginal note in his copy of Theobald, ingeniously asserted ‘Must not Ferdinand have believed so – in the fleet that the tempest scattered?’11 His improbable idea that the missing son was in another wrecked ship preserves the line’s sense, though it offers no grasp of the audience’s ability to think that through: how could an audience have cause to think that? How might Ferdinand have imagined that? How might the actor make the audience think that? Kermode decorously offered a thought that, though ‘one hesitates to say so, … Shakespeare began writing with a somewhat hazy understanding of the dynastic relationships he was to deal with’.12 What is crucial to the moment is the opportunity the sudden invention of Antonio’s son offers for Prospero’s response, redefining who is Duke of Milan (himself, not Antonio) and contrasting one brave son with a ‘more braver daughter’. It is a contradiction and contradictoriness that is fundamental to Shakespeare’s style. Hesitating to believe that this is a relic of a source or an earlier version, I find it most likely to be a moment of Shakespeare’s invention for the purposes of the contrast, an idea whose implications he then either ignored or forgot. No one, I suspect, has ever left the theatre wondering what happened to that dead son of a Duke of Milan, the one apparently real loss in the shipwreck that left all the others unharmed. If these examples seem relatively trivial and also hypothetical, my next involves someone’s forgetting and we can and probably should imagine that someone being Shakespeare. In Much Ado About Nothing Q1 (1600), the play opens with an entry for five people, four of whom productions include and one of whom they almost always leave out: ‘Enter Leonato governor of Messina, Innogen his wife, Hero his daughter, and Beatrice his neece, with a messenger’ (sig.A2r). The opening of Act 2 again defines everyone in the entering group in relation to Leonato: ‘his brother, his wife, Hero his daughter, and Beatrice his neece, and a kinsman’ (sig. B3r). Innogen, Leonato’s wife, never speaks and never reappears. One can, of course, rethink the play in terms of the significance of this Innogen, producing what David Weil Baker terms ‘a historically

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preposterous rereading of the play in the first textual form we have of it’.13 Baker’s readerly reading and Michael Friedman’s theatrically sensitive reading both explore the effects of Innogen’s presence. Friedman shows how, silently, Innogen can be identified if Leonato’s line, answering Don Pedro’s enquiry whether Hero is his daughter, ‘Her mother hath many times told me so’ (1.1.101), is spoken with a ‘turn towards Innogen and [a] smile at her’ so that, ‘If she then meets his eyes, smiles, and nods in agreement, the audience will have no trouble identifying her as the mother of Hero.’14 This is true and Benedick’s intervention, ‘Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?’ (102), is all the more unpleasant if Innogen is there. Friedman also imagines how her presence might work in the church scene, if she is seen ‘support[ing] Leonato when he turns against his daughter’,15 and, indeed, though he does not contemplate it, if she were silently to oppose his anger. But she has no ghostly presence after the entry in 2.1. Though I have found no example of Innogen appearing in, as it were, her own right, Josie Rourke’s production at the Sheffield Crucible in 2005 found a different way in which Innogen could be present: Wanting to re-adjust the balance in the war of the sexes the play dramatizes, Rourke imported more women into the cast, … regendering Antonio, Leonato’s brother, as ‘Innogen’, his sister.16 Theobald thought she might be a vestige of a draft in which Shakespeare had ‘designed such a character; which … he found would be superfluous, and therefore he left it out’.17 Furness argued it to be more likely that ‘Shakespeare, in remodelling an old play, … carelessly suffered the old stage-direction to remain and merely omitted to erase the name of a character which did not enter his plan.’18 Clare McEachern suggests that the problem of Innogen is a sign of compositional method: she is ‘an instance of Shakespeare’s working method of conjuring up a raft of personnel, and then streamlining as he goes along, finding (or not finding) things for them to do, sorting out the action and necessary bodies as the plot thickens’.19 Certainly some of the characters shown or spoken of early in the play owe much to Shakespeare’s sources rather than to his distinctive treatment of a familiar narrative template.

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There is a further explanation for the vanishing of Innogen. Much Ado has four female roles and in 3.4, on the morning of what ought to be Hero’s wedding, all four are onstage at the same time: Hero, Margaret and Ursula come on at the scene’s start and, though Ursula leaves before Beatrice’s entry (3.4.5, 35.1), she reenters right at the scene’s end (88.1). Four might well have been the maximum of boy-actors the company had available. There are four in As You Like It: Rosalind, Celia, Phoebe and Audrey, all present onstage in the last scene. Such a pattern of four roles means that, with Innogen, there would have needed to have been a fifth boy in the cast for Much Ado, perhaps a role too far, since three are identified in the entry at the start of 2.1 (Innogen, Hero and Beatrice) and, though Margaret and Ursula are not named in the entry, they are onstage later in the scene without an entry at a different point. If Shakespeare had wanted Innogen to appear he may have overtaxed the company’s resources at the time. Whatever the source of the problem, Innogen looks like a ghost character, a figure imagined, rejected and incompletely deleted, a trace that was forgotten, whether by Shakespeare or someone else engaged in the process of transmission to print. In that sense – and especially if one accepts McEachern’s proposal – Innogen is like Claudio’s uncle. When the messenger praises Claudio’s deeds, Leonato responds ‘He hath an uncle here in Messina will be very glad of it’ (1.1.18–19) but the uncle is never mentioned again. Kristian Smidt plausibly proposed that he might have been intended to act as the go-between between Claudio and Hero, the role of a local citizen in Bandello’s story, Shakespeare’s source.20 The dangling reference again suggests a careless and unresolved idea, an invention not pursued but left behind in a line that might well have been deleted rather than forgotten and preserved. I have been concerned so far with names not spoken, with characters staying unnamed and hence unnameable. But the reverse can also occur: characters can have multiple names. I am not in this category worried about characters like Prince Henry in 1 and 2 Henry IV, Harry to his father, Hal to Falstaff. Is there, however, forgetting occurring when what has seemed to most to be the same character has two entirely and disconnectedly different names? In Comedy of Errors 3.1, as the Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio try to enter their own home and are blocked by Dromio of Syracuse,

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there is an entry for Luce who joins in the banter, immediately and adroitly. Her co-worker, the locked-out Dromio, names her: ‘Let my master in, Luce’ (3.1.49), the name confirmed by the indoors Dromio, ‘If thy name be called “Luce”, Luce, thou hast answered him well.’ (53). In the next scene, when Dromio describes to his master, in a long piece of comic business, the ‘kitchen wench’ who pursues him, her name is Nell. Nell is not given an entrance and Luce never reappears. Editors have assumed, sensibly, that Luce and Nell might well be the same person. Indeed, the 1986 Oxford edition renames the character in 3.1 as Nell, arguing that ‘Of the two names given the character, “Nell” … is inextricably bound up with the dialogue, as “Luce” (throughout the scene) is not’.21 So Dromio’s line in the edition becomes: ‘If thy name be called Nell, Nell, thou hast answered him well’ (3.1.53), with the ‘Nell/well’ internal rhyme working effectively. The name Luce may pun on ‘loose’ with the sense of sexually promiscuous, and that may have implications for the actor’s performance as Luce, even though the dialogue does not develop the suggestion. Certainly the name Nell is there later simply to enable a joke on her size and therefore is ‘inextricably bound up with the dialogue’, even without editorial intervention: ‘her name and three quarters – that’s an ell and three quarters – will not measure her from hip to hip’ (3.2.108–10). Perhaps Dromio has not forgotten the earlier name but wanted the joke to work, though I do not see how an actor could signal that. Did Shakespeare forget the earlier name? Did he think it was too close to Luciana? That name also seems to have given him trouble at this point in the play for, on her entry at the start of 3.2, she is misnamed ‘Iuliana’ and has a speech prefix ‘Iulia.’, an error that has perplexed editors who have resorted to proposing that Shakespeare was, for some reason, thinking back to the character named Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona. Another explanation, again providing a narrative of compositional process, is tentatively offered by Martin Wiggins: Luciana ‘may have originally been written as Juliana’ and ‘it is possible that [Nell] was originally written as Luce, but renamed Nell at the same time as Juliana became Luciana, to avoid confusion’.22 Dromio will refer to Luce/Nell as ‘Dowsabel’ at 4.1.110, a name which Shakespeare may have found in Michael Drayton’s Idea (1593) (sig. J2v), the earliest occurrence of the name so far found.

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As the names slide around, we may think that this is how comedy works and the identity of this minor – though memorable – character has little to do with her name. Productions often use all three, unwilling to lose any of the jokes. But one production at least has found a different and very deliberate solution, managing to include both Luce and Nell. Trevor Nunn’s 1976 RSC production, later filmed for television, had a well-padded and appropriately spherical Nell for Dromio of Ephesus and a slim and conventionally sexy Luce who ‘paired off with Dromio of Syracuse’,23 thereby ensuring that, like their masters, each Dromio was offered a female pairing, something that does not happen if Luce is also and simultaneously Nell. I suggested above that Nell’s name is offered simply for the sake of a joke. But there may be another kind of resonance operating. There are, after all, other Nells in Shakespeare’s work and Shakespeare seems to think about names in interconnected ways. Two of his Antonios, for instance, the ones in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, seem to align in terms of their erotic attachment to a man. Nell is one of the servants brought in for the Capulet party (1.5.9) and also the name of Poins’s sister whom, according to Falstaff’s letter, Poins has let it be rumoured that Prince Henry is to marry (2 Henry IV, 2.2.124). There is yet another Nell in Eastcheap, for, in Henry V, Mrs Quickly now has the first name Nell (2.1.19, 31). Nell is the name Humphrey Duke of Gloucester uses for his wife Eleanor in 2 and 3 Henry VI and it is also used in Troilus and Cressida by Paris for Helen of Troy, savagely indicted as a whore by some men in the play. As Maguire suggests, if we ignore the Eleanor/Nell example, ‘Shakespeare’s Helens/Nells are cast in the same mould. To Shakespeare, it seems, all Nells are loose; in Comedy of Errors Nell is both loose and Luce.’24 Perhaps remembering her name really may not matter very much. Kent Cartwright, in his Arden 3rd series edition, gives her name in the list of characters simply as ‘LUCE (or Nell)’.25 I seem to see the editor throwing up his hands in despair at that moment. These fragments of imprecise dramaturgy, of carelessness and forgetfulness, can modulate into larger problems that may be Shakespeare’s forgettings or someone else’s errors. I am not here concerned with those lines or stage directions that seem to some to be missing, moments that would complete circles, clarify tone. Hamlet never says to Claudius ‘You killed my father’, though Jack Slater, the action movie hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, does say it in the revision of the Olivier film that the boy Danny

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imagines in Last Action Hero (1993), following it, inimitably, with ‘Big mistake’, then asking himself ‘To be or not to be? … Not to be’ before, as the screenplay puts it, ‘the castle explodes into a cloud of fire. Splinters. Pieces fly’.26 Isabella never replies to the Duke’s proposal in Measure for Measure.27 No stage direction tells us Katharine’s tone as she delivers her long speech at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. And so on. These spaces are ones performance always necessarily resolves, using the gap to create radically different solutions in different productions, nowhere more so than with that speech of Katharine’s which, I firmly believe, can be and has been spoken in more widely varying ways than any other climactic moment in Shakespeare. One could classify such gaps as acts of forgetting but it is not a helpful classification. Other examples teeter on the edge of the hypothetical to an extent that, similarly, makes them unhelpful. Here are two examples, offered only to be discarded. At the end of the ‘balcony’ scene, Romeo speaks of the morning: The grey eyde morne smiles on the frowning night, Checkring the Easterne Clouds with streaks of light, And darknesse fleckted like a drunkard reeles, From forth daies pathway, made by Tytans wheeles. (Q2, 1599, sig. D4v = 2.2.188–91) After two more lines, he leaves and the scene ends. The next scene, 2.3, opens with the first entrance of Friar Laurence who speaks the same four lines with minor variants: The gray-eyed morne smiles on the frowning night, Checkring the Easterne clowdes with streaks of light: And fleckeld darknesse like a drunkard reeles, From forth daies path and Titans burning wheeles: … No one has seriously proposed the repetition is intentional. Everyone agrees that the lines should have appeared only once but that the printer (probably) misunderstood the manuscript’s markings, which might have marked the second for deletion. F1, like Q2, prints them twice. Q1 (1597) prints them only once, as the friar’s. F2 (1632) prints them only once, as Romeo’s. Most editors have followed F2, though the Oxford Shakespeare makes them the Friar’s. Explanations

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for one choice over the other can be complex hypotheses about the textual transmission, with someone, perhaps Shakespeare, wanting the lines revised and moved. Other explanations depend on the ‘balcony’ scene’s ending, as Juliet says, at a time that is ‘almost morning’ (2.2.176). The scene would then be the first of the lovers’ two partings in the dawn, the second being forever. If it is Romeo who speaks of ‘Titan’s burning wheels’, he would then prefigure Juliet’s wish that the horses of the sun, those ‘fiery-footed steeds’, would ‘Gallop apace’ (3.2.1). One might imagine that Shakespeare forgot to mark the deletion or that he put in a mark that appeared to place the second version as part of the Friar’s speech rather than Romeo’s. But viewing it as forgetting is perhaps a little over-elaborate. My second is over Shakespeare’s treatment of a source. It is a familiar fact that Shakespeare’s plays are short of references to presumed but absent mothers/wives. King Lear opens with a dialogue that discusses Edmund’s mother, a topic Edmund returns to: ‘My father compounded with my mother’ (1.2.130–1). Later, Lear imagines Goneril as a mother as he curses her with barrenness or, ‘If she must teem, / Create her child of spleen’ (1.4.274–5); he speaks of the ‘Histerica passio’ as ‘this mother’ that ‘swells up towards my heart’ (2.2.251–2); and, when Regan enters at Gloucester’s castle and greets Lear with ‘I am glad to see you Highness’, Lear responds with the extraordinary statement: ‘Regan, I think you are … / … If thou shouldst not be glad, / I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb, / Sepulchring an adultress.’ (2.2.323–30). King Leir, the play’s major source, opens with Leir and his nobles entering from the burial of his queen: Thus to our griefe the obsequies performd Of this our (too late) deceast and dearest Queen, Whose soule I hope, possest of heavenly joys, Doth ride in triumph ’mongst the Cherubins …28 The death and funeral of his wife is the explicit prompt that leads him to ask his nobles for advice about what to do with his daughters, for, as he puts it, the women are ‘wanting now their mothers good advice, / Under whose government they have received / A perfit patterne of a virtuous life’. Leir goes further, identifying both how little he knows about them, ‘Yet are we ignorant of their affayres: / For fathers best do know to governe sonnes; / But daughters steps

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the mothers consell turnes’, and also that ‘A sonne we want for to succeed our Crowne’ (A2r). It is fascinating material as a way of entering the play: the loss of spouse, the gender division for raising children, the lack of a son, all these could have been powerful drivers for Shakespeare’s 1.1. He uses none of them. Did he forget what King Leir offered at the start? One might conceivably argue so but it seems such a deliberate erasure of the possibility that forgetfulness is more than a little unlikely as cause. As Howard Barker puts it in the Introduction to his play Seven Lears: Shakespeare’s King Lear is a family tragedy with a significant absence. The Mother is denied existence in King Lear. She is barely quoted even in the depths of rage or pity. She was therefore expunged from memory. This extinction can only be interpreted as repression.29 But there are, I suspect, other moments in Shakespeare’s use of sources where we might find signs of his forgetting. Convincing traces of Shakespeare’s forgetfulness are, I am suggesting, few and far between but, like Homer, Shakespeare occasionally nods.

Forgetting Shakespeare I turn from what Shakespeare might have forgotten to the history of forgetting Shakespeare, again only to sketch a couple of moments that might lead to further fruitful analysis. In 1632, the second edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the Second Folio, included a new poem by a young and little-known poet, John Milton, the first English poem by him to appear in print: his ‘Epitaph on the Admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare’. Having stated that Shakespeare’s bones need no pyramidal tomb, Milton praises Shakespeare as Deare Sonne of Memory, great Heire of Fame, What needst thou such dull witnesse of thy Name? Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thy selfe a lasting Monument …30

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The praise is conventionally hyperbolic, the fulsome rhetoric of the trope. One need not place too much weight on it as entirely accurate. By the time Milton published Samson Agonistes in 1671, Shakespeare seems, by his absence, to have been forgotten. In the preface, Milton identifies those who ‘will best judge’ as those who are not unacquainted with ‘Æschulus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Three Tragic Poets unequall’d yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavor to write Tragedy’.31 Whatever praise Shakespeare warranted in 1630, the year in which Milton claimed the epitaph was written, was not sufficient to rank him alongside the trinity of Greek tragic authors. Yes, Milton’s preference was bound to be for classical forms rather than for the contemporary theatre of his childhood but the suppression of Shakespeare, whose influence on his work was substantial, seems like a significant erasure. If it is not an accidental forgetting, it must be a deliberate one, a refusal of that status that the 1630 poem advocated and which was rapidly becoming, not least through the advocacy of John Dryden, a cultural norm. This moment marks almost the last time in England at which Shakespeare can be forgotten or erased as if forgotten. For all the long tradition of attempts to dislodge Shakespeare from his mountain-top – I think, for example, of Tolstoy’s loathing of Shakespeare, pinpointed by his preference for King Leir over King Lear32 – forgetting him stops being an option. But forgetting some of his work remained a possibility, especially in terms of performance. In tracing the mostly familiar history of two examples of this forgetting, with Titus Andronicus and Troilus and Cressida, I want to mark the ways in which this forgetting is not only sometimes of the plays themselves but also and sustainedly of their theatrical viability, their power in performance, the ways in the theatre in which each distinctively makes its own decisive intervention. It is likely, perhaps even probable, that Troilus and Cressida was never performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The title page of one of the two states of the 1609 Quarto (Qa) announces the play as being ‘As it was acted by the Kings Maiesties servants at the Globe’, while the other (Qb), as well as removing any such statement from its title page, adds a prefatory epistle supposedly from the publisher, ‘From a never writer, to an ever reader’ (sig. ¶2r), which explicitly states that this is ‘a new play, never stal’d with the stage, never clapper-

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clawd with the palmes of the vulger’. Some have followed Peter Alexander’s suggestion that this indicated a performance elsewhere where the ‘vulger’ would not have been in the audience, for example at the Inns of Court,33 though there is no record of a performance there or at court. Others have argued that the prefatory epistle could have been written earlier than 1609, at a point when publication was planned to have occurred prior to performance, Gary Taylor suggesting January 1603 as its date.34 Away from guesswork and hypotheses, the first known performance is not of Shakespeare’s play at all but of Dryden’s adaptation in 1679 and occasionally, but not at all often, thereafter, a playbill for a performance in 1697 announcing it as ‘Not Acted these 16 Years’ and with no performances recorded after 1734.35 Dryden was forthright about what he did not like in the play: … the Author seems to have begun it with some fire; the Characters of Pandarus and Thersites, are promising enough; but, as if he grew weary of his task, after an Entrance or two, he lets ’em fall: and the latter part of the Tragedy is nothing but a confusion of Drums and Trumpets, Excursions and Alarms. The chief persons, who give name to the Tragedy, are left alive: Cressida is false, and is not punish’d.36 Dryden’s view of the play as a ‘heap of Rubbish, under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly bury’d’ (226) seems to have infected his twentieth-century editors who, in their commentary, refer to Dryden’s play as ‘more popular than the original, which has usually had only moderate praise from even the most ardent advocates of Shakespeare’ (499). This comment, in 1984, was long after two extraordinarily powerful RSC productions of the Shakespeare version, by Peter Hall and John Barton in 1960 and by Barton alone in 1968, productions that, whatever the impact of earlier twentieth-century performances, established unalterably the devastating power and coherence of the play in performance. I have to admit that, having seen both, at the Aldwych Theatre in London, in 1962 and 1969 respectively, they undoubtedly influenced my admiration of the play when I first studied it as an undergraduate; I rate the second as one of the greatest Shakespeare productions I have ever seen. Few, after seeing either of these, would give the

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play ‘only moderate praise’, for they revealed a play that had finally struck a particularly timely chord, a postwar era and a moment of anti-war protest prompted by the Vietnam War. Whatever one thinks of Dryden’s version, which makes sure that there are plenty of deaths, with Cressida committing suicide on the battlefield as a token of her love for Troilus, Troilus killing Diomede and Achilles killing Troilus, my point is the extent to which, when Dryden adapted it, Shakespeare’s play already had been and, as I shall set out, continued for so long to be completely ignored and forgotten by the theatre. By comparison Titus Andronicus seems to have had a good deal of early popularity. It had never quite fallen out of fashion and, immediately after the Restoration, continued to be performed: John Downes, after enumerating the fifteen most popular preinterregnum stock plays complete with cast-lists, comments that ‘there were divers others Acted’, listing twenty-one more, with Titus the last, that ‘were Acted but now and then; yet being well Perform’d, were very Satisfactory to the Town’.37 No more precise records than that survive. Titus was adapted by Edward Ravenscroft probably around 1678 or 1679. Ravenscroft’s attitude to Shakespeare’s play in his preface is strikingly like Dryden’s: ‘ … ’tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his [Shakespeare’s] Works. It seems rather a heap of Rubbish th[a]n a Structure’.38 Ravenscroft’s version increases the role of Aaron, making it so attractive that in 1724 the star actor James Quin chose the play and the role for his benefit. The few recorded performances of Ravenscroft’s version between 1717 and 1724 were undoubtedly because of Quin’s success but thereafter the adaptation vanished from the repertory. By the mid-1770s, when John Bell published the texts of Shakespeare’s plays in the acting versions then current in the theatre, each with commentary by Francis Gentleman, he included plays not then part of the repertory, with Gentleman offering his own suggestions for cuts and his commentary on what was good or bad. Gentleman could see little potential in either play. Troilus and Cressida was, ‘except some very fine sentiments scattered up and down, … void of the essential requisites … it stands but a poor chance of giving either public or private satisfaction’.39 Along the way Gentleman finds little to like. So, for instance, he cuts Ulysses’s ‘degree’ speech heavily and comments: ‘we think it much too long,

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and too redundant for stage-delivery; therefore we have marked those lines which, in our view, may be best spared, if this piece should ever encounter the stage’ (23). Gentleman found even less to like in Titus, a play in which Shakespeare ‘has fixed upon such characters and incidents, as are totally offensive … Hence this play must be horrid in representation, and is disgustful in perusal.’40 The execution of Alarbus as an act of sacrifice ‘is objectionable, and had better not be brought to view in our days’ (9). His response to the rape of Lavinia sounds exasperated: ‘How any man, especially such a genius as Shakespeare, could think that the horrid purport of this scene could be passable on the stage, or in the closet, we are at a loss to conceive’ (29). As for the entry of the mutilated Lavinia, just the stage direction ‘is truly shocking to human feelings, and the mutilated object too impracticable for representation’ (34). Gentleman would be proven wrong on the question of what is practicable onstage but her entry is still rightly shocking. The plays stayed unperformed. At some point in or after 1791, John Philip Kemble toyed with the idea of mounting a production of Troilus and cut and rearranged the play to see whether he could make it work.41 Kemble often followed Gentleman’s suggestions but, in the end, he abandoned the attempt: ‘Despite the reworking of the material into epical and ethical form, apparently Kemble too felt defeated. The risks remained too high. His promptbook was left unacted.’42 More than a century passed before the play began to be seen as not simply viable but necessary. In the first major English production, after a number of European productions had begun to demonstrate the play’s viability, William Poel staged it in 1913 at King’s Hall in London, stressing ‘the absurdity and bitterness of war and the kind of damaging compromises it forces on those caught up in war’.43 Edith Evans, making her stage debut as Cressida, played her as older than Troilus and far more worldly; as the lovers separated, this Cressida ‘was soon bored with the selfpitying hyperboles of her lover … she pinned on her hat as though resolved to look smart for her arrival in the Greek camp’.44 Or, as Edward Garnett put it in his review, she was ‘visibly intent on her looks and on her change of fortune, while Troilus is boring her with his repeated “But yet be true”’.45 It is somehow especially appropriate that, in casting Evans in the role, Poel had rescued her from her job in a milliner’s shop.

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What Poel pinpointed, in a production dressed in Elizabethan costumes on a bare stage, was something of what Jeanne Newlin identifies, in the title of an article, as the play’s ‘modernity’, a keynote of her approach to the play’s twentieth-century stage history. Newlin extensively documented how much academic opinion of the play aligned with that of Dryden’s later editors, as she argues for the importance of ‘theatrical criticism’, not only in relation to Troilus, which she uses simply as the opportunity for a case study. I suggested that Barton’s 1968 production spoke to a culture opposed to the Vietnam War, just as Poel’s production connected with sentiments on the eve of the First World War and Michael MacOwan’s 1938 production at the London Mask Theatre did on the eve of the Second World War. By 1956, W. A. Darlington, a wellknown theatre reviewer, could confidently state that ‘[f]rom being one of the least known and most seldom revived of Shakespeare’s plays, Troilus and Cressida has become a favourite’.46 By the time of the Hall/Barton production in 1960, critics spoke comfortably of the play as ‘so modern that its modernity could be left to look after itself’, for ‘no better example of the timelessness of Shakespeare – or, if you like, of his modernity – can be found’, in a production that ‘was deeply moving and disturbingly topical’.47 From being forgotten and ignored, Troilus and Cressida had become a necessary play; from being incoherent, it had become an ensemble drama exploring a complex message; from being a ‘heap of Rubbish, under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly bury’d’, it had become a complexly unified way of thinking about contemporary culture. Titus Andronicus’s journey towards being remembered was different. Francis Gentleman’s affronted loathing of the play was shared for a long time. There was one significant exception in the adaptation by Charles A. Somerset, first performed in 1849, created for and with the help of Ira Aldridge, the African American star actor, often called ‘the Negro Tragedian’, as if that were some kind of oxymoron. They dispensed with such horrors as the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, and, as Ravenscroft had done, made Aaron, now Tamora’s husband, the star role. The review in The Era during London performances in 1857 announced that the numerous decapitations and gross language which occur in the original are wholly omitted, and a play not only presentable

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but actually attractive is the result. Aaron is elevated into a noble and lofty character … and the only person whose sanguinary character is not much toned down is Saturninus, the Emperor, who maintains the impurity of the original throughout.48 The adaptation was not published and no copy is known. Playbills for the production included a note by Somerset addressed to ‘the Admirers of Shakespeare’: Of all the productions of our immortal bard, ‘TITUS ANDRONICUS’ is perhaps the least known to the play-going portion of the British Public; nor is it, like many unacted plays, calculated to gratify the student in the seclusion of his library. The sanguinary incidents interwoven with the plot render it altogether repugnant to good taste and modern refinement … It was therefore to rescue ‘TITUS ANDRONICUS’ from unmerited and perpetual oblivion (for it could never be acted as written, before a modern audience) that the present adaptation of this really wonderful play has been undertaken.49 Very, very little of Shakespeare’s text was left, not only in plot but also in language. Hence, as Alan Dessen comments, ‘only with some strain can the Aldridge version be viewed as part of the stage history of Titus’.50 Shakespeare’s play was performed at the Old Vic in 1923, directed by Robert Atkins as part of its seven-year cycle of the complete canon. As veteran Shakespeare playgoer Gordon Crosse noted, the play’s ‘horrors … were by no means glossed over. The audience bore them very well until the end when they refused to take them seriously any longer’.51 As a result, though a production was announced for Stratford in 1929, it never happened and ‘boxoffice logic prevailed’.52 There were some other attempts, particularly a thirty-five-minute version created by Kenneth Tynan and Peter Myers as part of an experiment in Grand Guignol at the Irving Theatre in 1951, excising Aaron and Saturninus completely but leaving in as much gore as possible. Henry Hobson, reviewing it for the Sunday Times, praised the programme’s ‘blood-boltered, nightmare-screaming, blooddripping way’ especially when the stage was full of ‘practically the whole company waving gory stumps and eating cannibal pies’. It was, he concluded wryly, ‘really splendid, though not calculated

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with an eye to moral improvement’.53 The Times’s anonymous reviewer noted that the excerpts from Titus ‘involve some ingenuity with blood and bandages but yet … cannot altogether silence the question how far a first-class production of the original play might discover something in extenuation of its barbarities’.54 Tynan, in an angry letter to Theatre Weekly in response to a savage review, described the project’s aims: It … ranges, with a sort of grim lightness, through giggles and yelps, horror and nausea, to sheer melodramatic narrative, and even, at moments, to something approaching awe. It’s our attempt to reintroduce to the theatre, if only for a few minutes, the smell of the bearpit which helped to cradle it.55 The reviewer had noted the presence in the auditorium of paramedics. Tynan’s response ended with a comment on that complaint: … they’re not, I assure you, superfluous. An average of two people, in an audience of just over a hundred, have fainted at each performance. And last Sunday, to everyone’s astonishment, one of the Ambulance men fainted himself.56 It was Peter Brook’s production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1955, with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, the first performances ever recorded in Stratford, that provided that ‘first-class production’ and discovered an immense amount that showed the barbarities did not need extenuating. It singlehandedly transformed the view of the play as performable, a view cemented by Deborah Warner’s production at the RSC’s Swan Theatre in 1987, with Warner playing a very nearly complete text and allowing the play’s rapid switches from ghoulish laughter to tragic monumentality in ways Brook’s cutting had not. As Brook commented, as he wrote ‘An Open Letter to William Shakespeare, or, As I Don’t Like It’, What has happened to you? … Now it’s you who are always getting such a terrible press. When the notices of Titus Andronicus came out, giving us all full marks for saving your dreadful play, I

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could not help feeling a twinge of guilt. For to tell the truth it had not occurred to any of us in rehearsal that the play was so bad.57 Brook’s approach was premised on an unexpected stylization. As he described it, the production was ‘about the most modern of emotions – about violence, hatred, cruelty, pain – in a form that, because unrealistic, transcended the anecdote and became for each audience quite abstract and thus totally real’.58 It was said that, as with Tynan’s guignol version, paramedics needed to be on hand, supposedly because playgoers fainted at the sight of the mutilated Lavinia but the photographs show that there was no blood, only red streamers from her wrists and a red scarf stuffed in her mouth. If the St John’s Ambulance personnel were again present, as persistent rumour suggests, it shows how the spectators, simply by thinking through the unreal to what it represented, could indeed turn the abstract into something totally and overwhelmingly real. What Brook revealed was how wrong it had been to forget Titus Andronicus for so long. Rarely can any play have been revived so triumphantly and emphatically, bringing it back firmly into our memory, denying the cultural forgetting that had made it seem consigned to ‘perpetual oblivion’, at least in the form in which it had been written. There are other ways of forgetting Shakespeare apart from ignoring a play’s performability for hundreds of years. I want to close by looking briefly at the Iraqi playwright Jawad al-Asadi’s play Forget Hamlet.59 It was not the first title for the play: when staged in 1994 in Cairo, during al-Asadi’s long exile from his homeland, it was called Ophelia’s Window, the window through which this Ophelia saw Claudius murder the King (i.e. Hamlet’s father). AlAsadi’s new, imperative title instructs us to do the impossible: how can we and why should we forget Hamlet or Hamlet? Answers to my double question were offered by a reviewer, Sawsan al-Abrah: ‘He commands us categorically: Forget the Hamlet you knew before. Here is another Hamlet for you, one who resembles you because he is a child of the current Arab moment with all its vulgarity and ugliness and futility.’60 As Margaret Litvin notes and as al-Abrah went on to argue, the title is ironic: ‘anyone who took it literally would lose both al-Asadi’s craft and his message. The command to “forget Hamlet” is, of course, an injunction to keep him painfully in mind.’61

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This Hamlet is trapped in his own refusal to act and is seen as culpable for it. As Laertes says, to a Hamlet who is not onstage at this moment, ‘Claudius killed the just king, which of us doesn’t know that? And meanwhile Hamlet responds to his father’s murder with “to be or not to be.” Be, just for once be, you rat!’62 Talking with Horatio, this Hamlet can announce ‘[Claudius] killed my father or he didn’t kill him – it’s all the same to me … I don’t care about anything anymore. It’s how I’ve trained my body and mind to be.’ (20). This carefree attitude, not remotely that of someone trapped in inactivity but instead choosing very unconcernedly not to act, infuriates Laertes, Horatio and especially Ophelia: ‘They murder his father in front of him and he doesn’t budge from all his wisdom and composure. He turns his back on the murderer and keeps contemplating and philosophizing. It’s an unforgivable crime!’ (24). In the play’s recasting of the nunnery scene, the scene that Cartelli focuses on, Ophelia appropriates and adjusts lines we think of as Hamlet’s: ‘Get yourself to a monastery … There you can focus your body and your mind on the pressing theological questions. There you can have more peace and quiet to ask and reask your question, “to be or not to be.”’ (25). The anger towards Hamlet, especially pinpointed by the recurrent reference to ‘To be or not to be’ justifies Litvin’s reading of the title as relating to the character rather than the play: ‘an injunction to keep him painfully in mind’ (my italics). There is a long history to this concept, longer than consideration of Forget Hamlet has so far suggested. In Russia, for instance, Hamlet stood, in the nineteenth century, as the literary archetype for the neurasthenic response of the intelligentsia to the failure of Tsarist Russia to modernize. As Turgenev put it, in preferring Don Quixote to Hamlet in his highly influential 1860 essay on the two as opposing polarities of human nature, Hamlet represents ‘[a]nalysis, first of all, and egotism, and therefore incredulity’.63 As Turgenev develops his argument, he switches from ‘Hamlet’ to ‘Hamlets’ in his indictment: ‘The Hamlets are really useless to the people; they give it nothing, they cannot lead it anywhere, since they themselves are bound for nowhere.’64 These Hamlets become aligned with Turgenev’s concept of the ‘superfluous man’, as he outlined it in his 1850 novella, ‘Diary of a Superfluous Man’: someone educated but bored, uninterested in the greater good of the community, self-serving and cynical.65 The figure will be of vital importance to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and,

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especially, Chekhov. Al-Asadi does not reference this Russian type but the mark of Russian Hamletism is clearly the same kind of figure who deserves to be forgotten. What al-Asadi is aware of, in part, is the equivalent type in Germany. His essay, accompanying the playtext in its first Arabic publication, is titled ‘Sweeping Away Hamlet’ and references Heiner Müller’s Die Hamletmaschine (written 1977, premiered 1979) where ‘all the characters played out with unparalleled violence Müller’s vicious anger and hatred toward those who … invented justifications for collusion and appeasement with the enemy (i.e., Power)’.66 It is a short step back from al-Asadi’s Hamlet to the opening voice of Müller’s text: ‘I was Hamlet. I stood at the waterfront and talked to the surf BLAH BLAH, behind me the ruins of Europe.’67 Müller incorporated Die Hamletmaschine into Shakespeare’s play in a production, lasting well over seven hours, that he directed in Berlin in 1990, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin wall. Behind Müller lies a long German history. In 1877 Horace Howard Furness dedicated his New Variorum edition of Hamlet to ‘the German Shakespeare Society of Weimar, representative of a people whose recent history has proved once for all that “Germany is not Hamlet”’.68 This is a pointed reference to Ferdinand Freiligrath’s 1844 poem ‘Germany is Hamlet’ that Furness included in the edition, in a translation by his sister, ending: Why thus for ever dilly-dally? Yet, – dare I scold? – a poor old dreamer, – I’m, after all, ‘a piece of thee,’ Thou ever-loitering, lingering schemer! 69 The title is not praise but blame: Germany, for Freiligrath, shares with Hamlet the failure to act in accordance with the demands of the ghost, defined here as ‘Her buried Freedom’s steel-clad sprite’, for Hamlet’s ‘boldest act is only thinking / … No deed from all his talk he hatches’ (376–7). The title of al-Asadi’s essay points towards the one Russian connection he does make: he identifies as an influence on his thinking Yuri Lyubimov’s production at the Taganka Theatre, Moscow, in 1971, calling it ‘an inspired rewriting that set into motion some viruses, codes, and signs in the text that audiences and

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critics had ignored before’ (6). Both Forget Hamlet and Lyubimov’s production are powerfully engaged with how the play speaks of the brutality of power, emblematized by Lyubimov in the massive, heavy, shaggy carpet or curtain, like some vast mobile arras, that hung vertically onstage and could move, apparently at will, in any direction, sweeping up and enveloping any figures in its path and with a particular predilection for attacking and pursuing Hamlet. In Forget Hamlet Claudius’s murderous reign rages unchecked. Hamlet goes meekly to his death, as outside the palace the screams of the people rise in a long crescendo. Finally it is the blind Laertes who ‘slaughters’ Claudius and announces ‘The rest is silence … ’ (42). But the end is not there but in yet another scene for the two female gravediggers, the play’s choric figures. They find a book and one reads ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave’ from it. digger 2 [Hamlet’s] problem was his tongue. He kept philosophizing. Look, here’s his tongue. digger 1 Leave his tongue between the leaves of his book, and toss it up to heaven. The gravedigger indeed tosses the book up to the sky, and the pages fly high in the air. (43) As Cartelli argues, ‘Having repurposed Shakespeare’s Hamlet to try to make it do the kind of cultural and political work it was not originally designed to do, al-Asadi’s Forget Hamlet has, in turn, been hijacked by history’, for the Arab Spring performed attempts at political change in ways that the play ‘could only stage on the level of fantasy’.70 As al-Asadi invited his readers to sweep Hamlet (Hamlet?) away, he demands that a theatre director who approaches directing it should do so by ‘taking a big rock and shattering what’s expected’, for he wrote the play ‘so that new productions could dirty it with a different set of expectations that would make the text itself more brilliant and fresh – even if that means sweeping it away entirely’ (7). In our age of mash-ups and remakes, shattering the original, be it by Shakespeare or al-Asadi, is not to sweep it away but to appropriate it as, often (as with Forget Hamlet itself), an act of homage.

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Even if we wanted to, we are compelled to disobey al-Asadi’s injunction to forget and his hope that his work is swept away. We cannot forget Hamlet nor Hamlet nor Shakespeare. We can pretend not to know him, we can admit how much we once knew and have forgotten, we can claim his works have nothing to do with us or that we cannot live without them. As we use him and appropriate him, make him and remake him, we choose what to remember and what to forget, reverentially admiring him as a kind of holy writ or demanding that his plays or our adaptations of them are best explored by ‘taking a big rock and shattering what’s expected’.71 Each time we change our culture’s expectations, we find Shakespeare to be responsive to our actions in ways we had not anticipated. As we keep turning to him, finding afresh what we had for a while forgotten, we always remember that Shakespeare is for us the unforgettable writer.

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Coda: Bookends

The end of the previous chapter had a triumphalist air of conclusion about it. But I want to end the book with something designed to bookend the Preface. Where, then, I was concerned to use a group of reasonably recent films, comically fantastical and painfully realist, to suggest ways in which they have been so powerfully concerned with our cultural anxieties about social and individual forgetting, I now want to turn, briefly and finally, away from direct consideration of Shakespeare and towards two remarkable and recent novels, both of which appeared while this book was getting itself written and both of which rethink the activities of forgetting in ways that have altered my perceptions of how, in his very different contexts, Shakespeare thought about forgetting and we think about forgetting in Shakespeare performance. Their senses of ending through forgetting also appropriately end this book. Lance Olsen’s astonishing experimental fiction Theories of Forgetting (2014) makes us rethink the act of reading. The problem begins with the cover, for, on one side, it is clearly a back cover, complete with teasing summary, author’s photo, publisher’s information and a puff from another author – and then, when one turns it over, one finds exactly the same on the other side, except now rotated through 180 degrees. Two back covers and no front. Open either side and the front matter is the same, except for an epigraph which in one place is from Robert Smithson, ‘Nature is never finished’, and in the other from the travel writer Paul Theroux, ‘Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going’. In the first direction one finds oneself reading a narrative by and about Alana, a filmmaker who is completing a documentary about Robert Smithson, the American artist whose work Spiral Jetty

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(1970), a massive earthwork piece in the Great Salt Lake, figures recurrently in the narrative.1 As Alana experiences increasing signs of dementia, from an epidemic called ‘The Frost’, so her language disappears and her narrative is increasingly full of scored-through passages and nonsense word-forms, as if her ability to record is failing along with the novelist’s. By the end, language has vanished almost completely, except for a single word, in a much larger font, ‘hugh’ (367).2 Hugh is her husband’s name and his narrative goes from the other direction, as he grieves Alana’s passing and, increasingly disoriented, seems to have been kidnapped by a drug cult in Jordan, his story ending with ‘and then the– ’ (367). How, you might wonder, do both these endings, from opposite directions, have the same page number? Because each page is numbered twice, once for each direction, and each page contains material from each narrative, necessitating, again, a 180-degree rotation to read the other. Each appears in a different font: Adobe Garamond Pro for Alana’s, American Typewriter in a paler grey for Hugh’s. And then there is a third strand, bright blue handwritten marginalia all over Hugh’s text, by Aila, his daughter, commenting on anything and everything, often writing for/to her brother Lance, so that the novelist becomes both author and his own reader as he reads Aila’s marginalia. How can one read all this? Joe Sacksteder, in a review, suggested that it ‘is perhaps the only book ever written that begs to be read cover-to-cover-to-cover’.3 John Domini took a different course: ‘I read in both directions, going say 10 or a dozen pages one way … and then turning the book over & reading in the other direction’, asking Olsen ‘Did I do it wrong?’ Olsen’s response was reassuring: ‘I love that you engaged with reading as an event – with reading, that is, as self-conscious, embodied performance.’4 Olsen’s text encourages a kind or some kinds of reading that replicates much of what I have been doing with and to Shakespeare throughout this book: reading in fragments, working in multiple directions, aligning different texts to different ends. Much as I enjoyed the text, I found myself wondering about the title Olsen chose. Here is his response: I wish I could help more with the Theories of Forgetting title. It doesn’t reference another work, as far as I remember; nor does it appear as a line in the novel itself. Rather, it came to me as a way

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of thinking about the book, about how the whole is all about forgetting, both physically, in the form of the [three protagonists] … ; of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty which, as it sinks into the sand, forgets itself and will in a sense be forgotten as it is remembered; and so on. It’s the metaphor the novel drills down into.5 So, throughout this book, I have wanted the examples of forgetting to function as a kind of metaphor into which I too have drilled down. Olsen’s text is individual forgetting, not least in the fear that Alana’s dementia explores. My second bookending novel explores social forgetting, the concept of a society without memory, something that is not Shakespeare’s vision but becomes for us a terrifying one. In her novel The Chimes (2015), Anna Smaill creates a brilliantly conceptualized post-apocalyptic world, specifically England, in which people can no longer construct memories since ‘Allbreaking’, the past moment of apocalyptic change, after which all writing has vanished. Smaill creates an inventive and restrained vocabulary for the conditions of memory and forgetting in this future state, of which ‘Allbreaking’ is a good example, sounding apocalyptic, immediately comprehensible, specific to her fiction’s world. Each day now has two crucial components: the Matins communal commitment through the rehearsal of social unity as ‘Onestory’ and then the sound of the Carillon at Vespers that daily creates total amnesia, destroying individual memory, except for those few memories allowed and enabled to be enshrined in material objects that are contained in a memory bag and the ‘bodymemory’ that is available through following a musical score that the individual can create or be taught. To try to remember beyond what is there in body and objects is to create ‘dischord’ and would be ‘blasphony’. The musical terms lodged in these coinages are part of the novel’s complex meditation on music but I also recall that Dr P., the central figure in Oliver Sacks’s study of the man who mistook his wife for a hat, sang Schumann lieder to himself to enable him to go through the sequence of actions for mundane tasks like dressing himself.6 In Smaill’s world, to lose one’s ‘objectmemories’ is to join the ‘memorylost’ and to wander in a limbo of permanent forgetfulness, to be unable to function because without memory. The ‘objectmemories’ and ‘bodymemory’ are what the Order (both

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as a secret, rather monkish cabal based in Oxford and therefore also as the group that creates and controls social order) permits to maintain sufficient individuation to allow for social cohesion. Early in the narrative, Simon confronts the need to create a memory: What is it that tells you to make a memory? I can’t say. Something that sits raised and raw against the skin of the day. Something that presses at you … I start by looking round for an object that could hold the memory. Something with rough edges of its own to give a grip for the picture.7 The pen and paper I usually clutch as I settle in my seat in the theatre for a Shakespeare production are my means of immediately, albeit hieroglyphically, gaining ‘a grip for the picture’. But the torrent of performance information and the survivalist response in forgetfulness leaves me too completely and frighteningly close to Smaill’s ‘memorylost’, as I explored at the end of Chapter 6. In Smaill’s vision of a world without writing, even OMG Shakespeare would not help (see p. 174). Smaill’s narrative becomes familiar, almost predictable as action thriller, once the outlines of this world are established. But her vision of the particularities of this world is powerfully absorbing, by which I mean both that, in the cliché, it holds our attention and that we become absorbed into its details, its ways of existing and speaking of itself, its initial unfamiliarity in which we stumble over the new words as we read becoming disconcertingly familiar and hence no longer disconcerting at all. Within it, in the act of reading, we continually measure its world against ours as difference but also scared by its contiguities with ours. We enter it and live in it in a state that combines both memory and forgetting, both similarity and disjunction. The Chimes’s practice is threatening and memorable in its manifestation of the terminability of memory, the action of the Men in Black’s neuralyzer or even Newt Scamander’s ability to obliviate the whole of New York. Here it has become national, a sign of a different ordering of the state, a control that makes almost all memory temporary and almost all knowledge forgotten. We resist, because we must, its vision of a universal forgetting.

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I offer two versions of what these perceptions might mean for acting a Shakespeare role, drawing on two of the twentieth/twentyfirst centuries’ most brilliant Shakespeare directors. As Harley Granville-Barker thinks through how the actor can play King Lear, how he can ‘incarnate this poetry in himself’, he suggests that Physically, Shakespeare’s Lear must surrender to him; he makes himself in return an intellectual and emotional instrument for its expression. That is the way of all honest acting … He must comprehend the character, identify himself with it, and then – forget himself in it.8 To play Lear one must forget oneself in the act of playing: ‘very much as the storm’s strength is added to Lear’s when he abandons himself to its apprehension, so may the Lear of Shakespeare’s poetic and dramatic art be embodied in the actor if he will but do the same’ (269). This is a vision of individual forgetting. But must we also accept that unforgettability of Shakespeare that I envisioned earlier and which can seem like a cliché of Shakespeare’s supposedly universal power and glocalism? As so often, Peter Brook offers a consolation as he recommends the necessity of forgetting in his advice ‘to a young actor about to tackle one of these great roles’: ‘Forget Shakespeare. Forget that there ever was such a man. Forget that these plays had an author. Remember only that your responsibility is to bring human beings to life … It is only when we forget Shakespeare that we can begin to find him.’9

NOTES

Acknowledgements   1 The Women’s Theatre Group and Elaine Feinstein, Lear’s Daughters, in Gabriele Griffin and Elaine Aston, eds., Herstory, vol. 1: Plays by Women for Women (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 19–69, 36.

Preface   1 Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, rev. edn. 2011 [2009]).   2 Ibid., ch. 3.   3 Francis O’Gorman, Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).   4 Adam Epstein, ‘Scientists are a step closer to creating the memory eraser from “Men in Black”’, Quartz, 10 October 2014. Available online: https://qz.com/279326/scientists-are-a-step-closer-to-creatingthe-memory-eraser-from-men-in-black/ (accessed 21 January 2021).   5 ‘Neuralyzer’ on the Men in Black Wiki, https://meninblack.fandom. com/wiki/Neuralyzer (accessed 24 March 2020).   6 J. K. Rowling, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them: The Original Screenplay (New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2016), 115.   7 Ibid., 258–9, 263.   8 Michael Fried, ‘A Master Theme in Eighteenth-Century French Painting and Criticism’, ECS, 9.2 (1975), 175n72.   9 https://sites.google.com/site/lacunaincny/home (accessed 24 March 2020). 10 https://sites.google.com/site/lacunaincny/references (accessed 24 March 2020).

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11 https://sites.google.com/site/lacunaincny/company-history (accessed 24 March 2020). 12 See Christopher Grau, ed., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Philosophers on Film (London: Routledge, 2009), and in it, for my purposes specifically, Troy Jollimore, ‘Miserably Ever After: Forgetting, Repeating and Affirming Love in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, 31–60. 13 Alexander Pope, The Poems, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), 257, ll.207–10. 14 See Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2004), 84. 15 Wikipedia currently lists forty items under its ‘Films about Alzheimer’s Disease’. The mere existence of the list is a sign of the popularity of the concern for filmmakers; see https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Category:Films_about_Alzheimer%27s_disease (accessed 23 July 2020). 16 Jonah Lehrer, ‘The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever’, Wired, 17 February 2012. Available online: https://www.wired. com/2012/02/ff-forgettingpill/ (accessed 23 July 2020). Amy Cook kindly pointed me to this fascinating article. See also Karim Nader et al., ‘Memory as a new therapeutic target’, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 15.4 (December 2013): 475–86. Available online: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3898685/(accessed 21 January 2021). 17 Ibid. 18 See, most conveniently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ consolidation (accessed 21 January 2021). 19 Andrew Hiscock and Lina Perkins Wilder, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory (London: Routledge, 2018), 318. 20 Jelena Marelj, Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2019), 1. 21 Roberto Cubelli, ‘A new Taxonomy of Memory and Forgetting’, in Sergio Della Sala, ed., Forgetting (Hove: Psychology Press, 2010), 35–48, 35. 22 Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019), 9. 23 Douwe Draaisma, Forgetting: Myths, Perils and Compensations, trans. Liz Waters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 4. 24 Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir, Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 2. 25 Quoted in ibid., 2.

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26 Ann Rigney, ‘Plenitude, scarcity and the circulation of cultural memory’, Journal of European Studies, 35 (2005): 11–28, 17. 27 See the etymology set out in the OED’s entry for anamnesis, n. 28 Bishop Nemesius, The Nature of Man, trans. George Wither (London, 1633), 334, currently the earliest citation for the word on EarlyPrint (accessed 8 April 2020). 29 Quoted in Gudmundsdottir, Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction, 4. 30 Marc Augé, Oblivion, trans Marjolijn de Jager (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 14, 21 (originally published as Les Forms de l’oubli (1998)). 31 Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting, 9, from Willis Barnstone, Borges at Eighty: Conversations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 21. 32 See Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting, 85–6. 33 John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 227. 34 I make absolutely no claims to any expertise in cognitive psychology and its interests in memory. Much of what follows is heavily dependent on the helpful and accessible account by John Wixted in ‘The Psychology and Neuroscience of Forgetting’, Annual Review of Psychology, 55 (2004): 235–70. I have also learned much from many of the pieces in Sergio Della Sala, ed., Forgetting (Hove: Psychology Press, 2010). 35 Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, trans. Steven Rendall (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 2. It is striking that, even given the immense range of European literatures that he explores, Shakespeare barely makes an appearance.

Chapter 1  1 G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London: Routledge and Paul, 1957–75), vol. 5, 515.  2 Coriolanus, ed. R. H.Case and W. J. Craig, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1922), 54–5.  3 Review quoted in John Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America, 1609–1994 (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1998), 155–6.  4 Review in New York Times, quoted in Ripley,‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America, 1609–1994, 238.  5 Coriolanus, ed. Case, 54–5.

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 6 Deighton, quoted in Coriolanus, ed. Case, 55.  7 Coriolanus, ed. Case, 55.  8 Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank, The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series (London: Methuen, 1976), n. to 1.9.80–9.  9 Jonas Barish, ‘Remembering and Forgetting in Shakespeare’, in R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner, eds., Elizabethan Theatre: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 214–21, 215. 10 Robert N. Watson, ‘Coriolanus and the Common Part’, Shakespeare Survey 69 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 181–97; 189. 11 Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank, 148. 12 Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays. Vol. 9: Adaptations, ed. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 146. 13 King Henry V, ed. John Walter, The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series (London: Methuen, 1954), n. to 4.7.13–53. 14 Anne Barton, The Names of Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 115. 15 Gary Taylor, ‘The Fortunes of Oldcastle’, Shakespeare Survey 38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 85–100, 96. My thanks to one of the anonymous readers for suggesting that this argument needed referencing here, though the reader is more committed to this reading of these two passages than I am. 16 Isabel Karremann, The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 151. See also William E. Engel, ‘Handling Memory in the Henriad: Forgetting Falstaff’, in Andrew Hiscock and Lina Perkins Wilder, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory (London: Routledge, 2018), 165–79. 17 Jonathan Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories (London: Routledge, 2012), 128. 18 Robin Lane Fox, ed., Brill’s Companion to Ancient Macedon (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 344. 19 Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 244. 20 Michael Billington, ‘Michael Bryant’, Guardian, 30 April 2002. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/apr/30/ guardianobituaries.michaelbillington (accessed 9 March 2016). 21 Sean French, ‘Diary’, in Ralph Berry, ed., The Methuen Book of Shakespeare Anecdotes (London: Methuen, 1992), 196. 22 Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series (London: Methuen, 1982), 232. 23 Hamlet, ed. Robert Hapgood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 148.

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24 Roma Gill et al., eds., The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987–98), 1:169, 5.1.159. 25 See Carol Chillington Rutter, ‘Unpinning Desdemona (Again) or “Who would be toll’d with wenches in a shew?”’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 28 (2010): 111–32, and the remarkable filming that is presented, with helpful contexts, in Unpinning Desdemona – The Movie (2011). Available online: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ capital/teaching_and_learning/projects/unpinning/ (accessed 22 January 2021). The project was in part a response to Denise A. Walen, ‘Unpinning Desdemona’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 58 (2007): 487–508. 26 Laurie Maguire, ‘Othello, Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition’, in Lena Cowen Orlin, ed., Othello: The State of Play (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 17–44, 22. 27 Rutter, ‘Unpinning Desdemona (Again)…’, 115. 28 Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, ‘Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 55.4 (Winter 2004): 379–419, 410. See also John Jowett’s fascinating exploration of the significance of a different kind of writing tables manufactured by James Roberts, who entered Hamlet in the Stationers Register and printed Q2, ‘The Writing Tables of James Roberts’, The Library, 20 (2019): 64–88. 29 See Eric S. Mallin, ‘“You kilt my foddah”: Or Arnold, Prince of Denmark’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 50 (1999): 127–51. 30 See OED, hobby-horse, n. 2.b. 31 Martin Butler et al., eds., The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online (available online: https://universitypublishingonline. org/cambridge/benjonson/ [accessed 22 January 2021]), A Particular Entertainment at Althorp (1604), ll.265–7; Bartholomew Fair, 5.4.177; The Gypsies Metamorphosed, 424. 32 But see Old Meg of Herefordshire (1609), sig. B4a: ‘But looke you who here comes, Iohn Hunt the Hobby-horse, wanting but three of an hundred, twere time for him to forget himselfe, and sing but O, nothing but O, the Hobbie-horse is forgotten.’ 33 Alan Brissenden, ‘Shakespeare and the Morris’, RES, ns 30 (1979): 1–11, 10. See also the fine work of Natália Pikli in ‘The Prince and the Hobby-Horse: Shakespeare and the Ambivalence of Early Modern Popular Culture’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 2 (2013): 119–40. 34 See David Farley-Hills, ‘A Hamlet Crux’, Notes and Queries, 42 (Sept 1995): 319–20, 320. 35 See, for example, his The Collective Memory (New York: Harper and Row, 1980; translation of Le Mémoire collective (1950)) and On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; translation of Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire); and Jeffrey K.

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Olick et al., eds., The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 36 Hamlet: The Second Quarto, 1604–05, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare 3rd series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), n. to 4.5.104. 37 King Henry IV Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan, Arden Shakespeare 3rd series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002), n. to 3.1.4–6.

Chapter 2  1 For convenience, I take the counts from Marvin Spevack, The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973). Variants might produce some marginal differences but agreement on exact numbers is not important, only on the relative size of each grouping.  2 Compare also the verb form, ‘Theatre. To memorize (lines), to acquire knowledge and understanding of (a part, etc.)’ (study v. 13.b, with examples from Twelfth Night, ‘I can say little more than I have studied, and that question’s out of my part’ [1.5.171–2] and Hamlet, ‘You could for a need study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines’ [2.2.542–3]). Note also the association of study and pain in Viola’s comment ‘I took great pains to study it’ (Twelfth Night, 1.5.187). In noting that this is the OED’s earliest example of study in this theatrical sense, I do not mean that it is a Shakespeare coinage. The huge count of earlier uses of the word study might well yield an earlier example but there are thousands of them in EarlyPrint earlier than the mid-1590s. None of Stern’s examples (see next n.) is earlier than A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  3 Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 61–4.  4 Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London: Routledge, 2004), 135.  5 OED, dry, v., 2.d, earliest example from 1934. An earlier term was ‘fluff’ (OED, v.1, 5.d, earliest example 1884).  6 David Lowenthal, ‘Memory and Oblivion’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 12 (1993): 171–82, 173.  7 There are no other early examples in OED or in EEBO TCP. OED’s other citations (Malone in 1800 and two more in the nineteenth century) seem to derive from Shakespeare’s use.  8 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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 9 Douwe Draaisma, Forgetting: Myths, Perils and Compensations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 3. 10 See Stephanie Lichtenfeld et al., ‘Forgive and Forget: Differences between Decisional and Emotional Forgiveness’, PLoS ONE, 10.5 (2015): e0125561, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0125561. 11 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Kate Bennett, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2:915 (omitting Aubrey’s deletions). 12 See Ben Johnson, ‘Queen Elizabeth I’, http://www.historic-uk.com/ HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Queen-Elizabeth-I/ (accessed 1 August 2017). 13 Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 185. 14 Doug Eskew, ‘Richard II and the Unforgetting Messiah’, Exemplaria, 27.4 (2015): 307–28, 318–19. 15 Walter Raleigh, ed., Johnson on Shakespeare (London: Oxford University Press, 1916), 102. 16 Jonas Barish, ‘Remembering and Forgetting in Shakespeare’ in R.B. Parker and S.P. Zitner, Elizabethan Theatre (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 214–21; 220. 17 The Oxford 1986 edition cuts the ‘servants’ from its SD, though they are present in F. 18 Barish, ‘Remembering and Forgetting in Shakespeare’, 221. 19 OED, forget, v., 3.b. 20 Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, Arden Shakespeare 2nd series (London: Methuen, 1982), n. to 5.2.77–8. 21 Adrian Poole, ‘Laughter, Forgetting and Shakespeare’, in Michael Cordner et al., eds., English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85–99; 94–5. 22 Quoted from LEME: Lexicons of Early Modern English Database (accessed 28 May 2016). But see also the intriguing example in Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (London, 1578), sig. 4K5v, in which, s.v. multa, he quotes Virgil Aeneid, 5.805, ‘Millia multa dare lethe. Virg. To kill many a thousande’. Modern editions of Aeneid read ‘daret leto’, from letum, death. 23 Preface, sig. [χ]2r, quoted in Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic, ‘Introduction’, in Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams, eds., Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 6. 24 Jonathan Baldo, ‘Shakespeare’s Art of Distraction’, Shakespeare, 10 (2014): 138–57, 141. See also his ‘Well-Divided Dispoisitons: Distraction, Dying, and the Eroticism of Forgetting in Antony and

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Cleopatra’, in John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti, eds., Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2016), 159–76. 25 Baldo, ‘Shakespeare’s Art of Distraction’, 143. 26 Ibid., 141. 27 Quoted OED, oblivion, n., 1.c 28 William Fulbecke, A Historical Collection (1601), 173. 29 Chosen almost at random, I quickly found the double at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1910, the RSC in 1971, 1996 and 2012, and the National Theatre in 2017. It was watching a livestream of the last that made me realize that the doubling meant the Captain could not reappear. 30 Miranda Johnson-Haddad, ‘The Shakespeare Theatre, 1991–92’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 43 (1992): 455–72, 462. 31 OED, will, n.1, 14 again (†against) one’s will. 32 Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., ‘Lethargic Corporeality on and off the early modern stage’, in Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams, eds., Forgetting Early Modern Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 41–52, 45. This section depends hugely on Sullivan’s outstanding work. 33 Quoted by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 41. 34 Quoted in Zackariah Long, ‘“Unless you could teach me to forget”: Spectatorship, self-forgetting and subversion in antitheatrical literature and As You Like It’, in Ivic and Williams, Forgetting, 151–64, 152. Compare also Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted (1582): ‘[plays are] necessary to bee banished, least wickedness be learned … and by little and little we forget God’ (sig. G4v). 35 Stephen Orgel, ‘King Lear and the Art of Forgetting’, in his Spectacular Performances (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 101–8; 101. 36 Jorge Luis Borges, The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2013), 182–3. 37 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor, rev. ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 109. 38 I owe my introduction to this passage to Poole, ‘Laughter, Forgetting and Shakespeare’, 88. 39 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 130. 40 Poole, ‘Laughter, Forgetting and Shakespeare’, 88. 41 Milan Kundera, Slowness, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 115.

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Chapter 3  1 Andrew Hoskins et al., ‘Editorial’, Memory Studies, 1 (2008): 5–7; 5.  2 Memory Studies, 1 (2008): 59–71, later revised as a chapter of his The Spirit of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 33–50.  3 Hoskins, ‘Editorial’, 5.  4 American Psychologist, 54 (1999): 182–203; The Seven Sins of Memory (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). Schacter’s seven sins are: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias and persistence.  5 Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).  6 Matthew Hugh Erdelyi, ‘Forgetting and Remembering in Psychology’, 273–8; Jefferson A. Singer and Martin A. Conway, ‘Should we forget forgetting?’, 279–85; Ineke Wessel and Michelle L. Moulds, ‘How Many Types of Forgetting?’, 287–94, all from Memory Studies, 1 (2008).  7 I found helpful here Michael C. Anderson and Collin Green, ‘Suppressing unwanted memories by executive control’, Nature, 410 (2001): 366–9.  8 First published in French in 2000, translation published in 2004 (Chicago: Chicago University Press).  9 Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 10 Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 6. Anderson quotes in French. I take the translation from Martin Thom’s version, Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 8–22; 11. 12 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 158. 13 ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, xiv. 14 John Frow, ‘Toute la mémoire du monde: Repetition and Forgetting’, in his Time and Commodity Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 218–46, 229. 15 Alan Baddeley, ‘The Psychology of Remembering and Forgetting’, in Thomas Butler, ed., Memory: History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 33–60; 57. 16 Paul Keegan, ‘Introduction’ to Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everday Life, The New Penguin Freud, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin Books, 2002), x. 17 Ibid., 12–18.

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18 Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism, trans. Kate Soper (London: NLB, 1976), 29–40. 19 Adam Phillips, ‘Freud and the Uses of Forgetting’, in his On Flirtation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 22–38, 22. 20 ‘Funes, His Memory’ in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 131–7. Hurley explains his retitling, driven by the oddity of the conventional title where ‘Funes el memorioso’ has nothing within it of the strangeness that ‘Memorious’ has in English, at 535. He particularly likes, as do I, the French title ‘Funes ou La Mémoire’. 21 Amy Cook, Building Character (Ann Arbor: University of Michgan Press, 2018), 58–9. 22 Ibid., 58 23 A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, new edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 66. 24 Edward S. Casey oddly reports that S. tried numerous techniques ‘such as imagining that what he had experienced on a given day was blasted to smithereens by dynamite’ but I can find no such account in Luria’s work. See Edward S. Casey, ‘Forgetting Remembered’, Man and World, 25 (1992): 281–311, 284–5. 25 Cicero, De finibus, 2.32.104, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 197. In a different version, Cicero has Themistocles replying ‘he would be doing him a greater kindness if he taught him to forget what he wanted than if he taught him to remember’ (Cicero, De oratore, 2.74.299, trans. E. W. Sutton, 2 vols, Loeb edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 1:427). 26 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. William S. Baring-Gould, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1967), 1:154. I quote at such length partly because it is a classic example of the memory store concept but distinctly later than its usual occurrences in medieval and early modern theories of the art of memory and partly because I was very excited by it when I first read it as a tweenager. 27 Ibid., 1:155. 28 Sonya Freeman Loftis, ‘The Autistic Detective: Sherlock Holmes and his Legacy’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 37.4 (2014). Available online: https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3728 (accessed 19 January 2020). 29 John Willis, The Art of Memory (London, 1621), 97; this is Willis’s own translation of the third part of his Latin text, Mnemonica (London, 1618). 30 John Willis, Menmonica or the Art of Memory (London, 1661), 31. This full translation of the 1618 text was by Leonard Sowersby (see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Willis, John).

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31 See p. 78, for Ricoeur’s balancing of an ars oblivionalis and an ars memoriae. 32 Umberto Eco, ‘An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!’, PMLA, 103 (1988): 254–61. 33 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditiations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57–124; 62. 34 Eugène Minkowski, Lived Time (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970; first published as Le Temps Vécu in 1933), 156. 35 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Row, 1962), 388–9, italics original. 36 Stéphane Symons, The Work of Forgetting (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), 104. See also p. 179 for Symons on the limitations of Heidegger’s argument. 37 See Michèle Simondon, Le Mémoire et l’oubli dans la pensée Grecque jusqu’à la fin du Ve siècle avant J.-C. (Paris: Société d’edition ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1982), esp. 128–49. 38 Hesiod, ‘Theogony’ in Theogony, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most, Loeb edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 55. In The Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, [1914] 1959), Hugh G. Evelyn-White translates the phrase as ‘forgetfulness of ills and a rest from sorrow’. 39 Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019), 12. 40 Karl Kerenyi, ‘Mnemosyne-Lesmosyne: On the Springs of “Memory” and “Forgetting”’, Spring, 1 (1977): 120–30, 121. 41 Symons, The Work of Forgetting, 105. 42 Richard Janko, ‘Forgetfulness in the Golden Tablets of Memory’, Classical Quarterly, 34 (1984): 89–100, 99. 43 Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, Loeb edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 621a. 44 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairchild, Loeb edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6.713–15. 45 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 11.602–4. 46 Kerenyi, ‘Mnemosyne-Lesmosyne: On the Springs of “Memory” and “Forgetting”’, 125. 47 Ibid. 48 Euripides, Orestes, trans. David Kovacs, Loeb edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), ll.213–14. ‘Oblivion of woes’ translates ‘lethe tōn kakōn’, perhaps more literally, ‘Oblivion of bad things’; compare Hesiod’s ‘lesmosyne tōn kakōn’, above.

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49 Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’, 62. The altar was in the Erechtheion. 50 Odai Johnson, Ruins: Classical Theatre and Broken Memory (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 54. 51 Ibid. 52 Hyde, Primer for Forgetting, 57. See Plutarch, Table-Talk Bk 9, in Moralia vol. 9, trans Edwin L. Minar et al., Loeb edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 249. 53 Plutarch, Table-Talk Bk 9, 251. 54 Nicole Loraux, The Divided City (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 42. 55 See LEME: Lexicons of Early Modern English, https://leme.library. utoronto.ca/, search term ‘amnestia’. 56 John Willis, The Art of Memory (London, 1621), 96–7. 57 John Willis, Mnemonica or the Art of Memory (London, 1661), 28–31. 58 John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge (London, 1602), sig. H3v. 59 Sig. C3r. 60 Cited by OED oblivious, adj. 3 ‘Of or relating to forgetfulness; attended by, associated with, or in a state of oblivion’. 61 William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane and Grant Williams, eds., The Memory Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 248. This is an outstanding anthology on which I have extensively relied. See also William E. Engel, ‘The Decay of Memory’, in Ivic and Williams, Forgetting, 21–40. 62 Ibid., 249. 63 Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 29 – the title page is reproduced on 28. 64 De la Primaudaye, 166, quoted in Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama, 29. 65 Quoted in Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama, 27. 66 Quoted in ibid., 29, Bullokar, sig. K1r. 67 Quoted in Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama, 35. 68 Engel et al., The Memory Arts, 239. 69 Ibid., 240. 70 Ibid., 134. 71 Ibid., 122. 72 Thomas Nashe, Selected Writings, ed. Stanley Wells (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), 13.

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Chapter 4  1 Mike Witmore and Jonathan Hope, ‘Books in Space: Adjacency, EEBO-TCP, and Early Modern Dramatists’, in Laura Estill, Diane K. Jakacki and Michael Ullyot, eds., Early Modern Studies After the Digital Turn (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016), 9–34, 18.  2 ‘The Life of Jedediah Buxton’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1754, 251–2; 251.  3 See Jonathan Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories (London: Routledge, 2012); Isabel Karremann, The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).  4 Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories, 74.  5 Ibid., 36–41; see F. R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 321–5.  6 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 323.  7 Karremann, The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare’s History, 7.  8 Ibid.  9 Karremann, The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare’s History, 9, quoting John Frow, ‘Toute la mémoire du monde: Repetition and forgetting’, in his Time and Commodity Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 218–46, 229. See p. 82. 10 I include Cymbeline as a comedy, i.e. like, say, The Tempest, in spite of its placement in F1 as a tragedy. As usual, the number here differs slightly but not significantly from those I used in Chapter 2 (see p. 43). 11 My figures: comedies have 45,429 lines at a rate of 1.67; histories 30,690 at a rate of 1.96; and tragedies 35,248 at 2.13. Number of lines taken from https://www.stagemilk.com/length-of-shakespeareplays/, with the addition of Two Noble Kinsmen from https://www. playshakespeare.com/two-noble-kinsmen (both accessed 22 January 2021). The choice of source here is arbitrary and the details are not offered as precise, for prose line counting will vary according to page width. I sampled playshakespeare.com’s lines per play and found the variation to be